The Numbers Behind Tenant Churn.
What CRE Research Tells Us About Why Tenants Leave
The most expensive event in a CRE portfolio isn't a lease expiry. It's a lease expiry you didn't see coming.
The research on why tenants leave is consistent across markets, asset classes, and geographies. The signals appear early. The decision forms long before the renewal conversation. And in the vast majority of cases, the landlord finds out at the worst possible moment: when the tenant is already looking elsewhere.
The Decision Happens Before the Conversation
Tenant advisory firms like Allegro Realty and Blackacre Advisors consistently recommend that tenants begin the renewal or relocation evaluation 12 to 18 months before lease expiry (Blackacre Advisors, 2026). By the time the formal renewal conversation happens, the decision is often well underway. It forms incrementally rather than as a single event. A service request that went unresolved. A quarter where the property team didn't reach out. An event the tenant didn't hear about in time to attend. Each instance is small on its own. Accumulated over months, they shape the outcome.
This matters because it means churn is largely preventable. The data exists in the building. The signals are there. The problem is that most landlords aren't reading them until the tenant is already in conversations with a competitor.
What Research Tells Us About Non-Renewal Drivers
Across the available research on lease non-renewal, a few drivers emerge consistently:
Perceived indifference from the landlord. Tenants who feel unknown to their property team, who receive generic broadcast communications, and who have never had a proactive outreach from building management cite indifference as a primary factor in their decision to leave. The relationship dynamic matters more than most landlords expect. Tenants don't just renew with buildings. They renew with teams that make them feel valued.
Service failures without follow-through. Unresolved maintenance issues, slow response times on service requests, and facilities problems that recur without resolution are consistently cited as renewal risk factors. The failure itself is rarely the breaking point. The absence of follow-through is. Research on service recovery, originally documented by McCollough and Bharadwaj in 1992, suggests that customers whose problems are handled promptly and communicated clearly can rate their overall experience higher than customers who never had an issue at all. The effect is context-dependent in the academic literature (Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 2022), but the dynamic shows up consistently in tenant conversations: how a building handles a problem tells the tenant more than the problem itself ever did.
Misalignment between space and how teams actually work. The shift toward collaborative, event-heavy office use has accelerated since 2020. CBRE's Global Workplace and Occupancy Insights Report documented a 25% year-over-year reduction in individual workspace since 2021, with collaborative zones and meeting rooms picking up the slack (CBRE). Tenants whose space configuration, amenity access, or building programming doesn't match how their teams now work are systematically less satisfied, regardless of physical quality. This is a leading indicator that stays invisible without utilization data.
Low engagement with the building ecosystem. Tenants who don't attend events, don't use amenities, and don't interact with the property team beyond transactional requests are significantly more likely to leave at renewal. Low engagement is not a symptom of a happy, independent tenant. It's a symptom of a disengaged one.
The Engagement-Retention Relationship
The relationship between engagement frequency and retention rates is the most actionable finding in the research. A 2024 study from MIT and Maastricht University by Hu, Kok, and Palacios, drawing on roughly 40,000 tenants across 2,900 office buildings, found that a one-point increase in tenant satisfaction was associated with an 8.6% higher willingness to renew and a 14.6% lower probability of moving out (Hu, Kok, and Palacios, SSRN 2024). Tenants who interact with their building regularly, through events, amenity usage, app engagement, or direct contact with the property team, build the kind of switching costs that tenants without those connections simply don't have.
A tenant who has built professional relationships through building events, who uses the fitness center three times a week, and whose team relies on the conference suite for client meetings is not going to walk away from that without a compelling reason. The building is no longer just where they work. It's the infrastructure for how they work. And infrastructure has switching costs.
The inverse is equally clear. A tenant who has never attended an event, never submitted a service request, and receives the same broadcast email as every other company in the building has no switching cost whatsoever. Their decision at renewal is a pure financial calculation.
The Measurement Problem
The reason churn continues to surprise landlords is not that the signals don't exist. It's that most portfolios aren't set up to read them. Engagement data, service request patterns, amenity utilization, event attendance: these live in separate systems, if they're tracked at all. The property team managing relationships across a 20-floor building is working from incomplete information, and the asset manager reviewing quarterly reports is seeing the financial picture without the relationship picture underneath it.
Tenant Health changes that equation. Not as a metric but as a practice: the discipline of tracking Usage, Engagement, and Sentiment for every tenant in a portfolio, continuously, so that a drop in activity that precedes a non-renewal decision is visible months before it becomes a lease event.
The research on tenant churn is not a post-mortem. It's a map. The landlords reading it are already acting on it.