Understanding Stacking Plans and Their Importance in Commercial Real Estate 

Commercial real estate professionals rely on various tools to streamline portfolio management, and one of the most valuable ones is the stacking plan. Stacking plans are visual representations of a commercial property, outlining tenants on each floor along with leasing details. These plans are truly helpful in enhancing the leasing or selling process and supporting CRE professionals in improving their property’s operations. 

While real estate stacking plans can be highly effective, manually creating and maintaining them is often time-consuming and expensive. However, using a specialized stacking plan software enhances efficiency, ensures real-time updates and provides a strategic advantage in the competitive CRE market. 

Here is everything real estate professionals need to know about stacking plans, from their essential components to the best ways to maximize their potential. 

What Is a Stacking Plan? 

A stacking plan is a visual representation of a property, illustrating tenant distribution across each floor. It includes information like: tenant names, occupied areas, lease terms, expiration dates, encumbrances and even rental rates. While they are most commonly used for office buildings, they can also be employed for multifamily and retail properties.  

A typical stacking plan is displayed as a diagram of a building, with each floor represented as a bar. Blocks are often color-coded or labeled to indicate the unit size, occupancy status and lease expiration dates. For example, spaces with leases expiring within the year may be marked red to signal they need attention. 

It’s important to distinguish stacking plans from floor plans. While a stacking plan provides a high-level view of tenant distribution and leasing status in a commercial space, a floor plan focuses on the physical layout of a property’s interior. Even if serving different purposes, they complement each other in CRE management. 

Why are Stacking Plans Important in CRE? 

Stacking plans are a valuable tool for understanding and showcasing space utilization in commercial properties, providing key benefits for CRE professionals: 

• Efficient Lease Management: By visually mapping key lease details like expiration dates, rent rolls and occupancy status, stacking plans enable brokers to track lease expirations, compare space and identify renewal or expansion opportunities, ensuring proactive lease management and deal-making.
• Marketing Available Spaces: Stacking plans facilitate the leasing and sale process by presenting space availability in a clear and structured format, along with insights on a property’s tenant mix, lease terms and types. 
• Enhancing Property Operations: Property managers can leverage stacking plans to plan around vacancies, schedule maintenance and coordinate tenant improvements, reducing potential disruptions.
• Investment Analysis: Visualizing a building’s tenant diversity, occupancy levels and lease maturities helps investors accurately assess property value and make informed decisions. 
• Portfolio Oversight: Stacking plans help owners and asset managers handling multiple properties to get a clear view of tenant distribution across different buildings. This enables better decisions on consolidations, repositioning and long-term portfolio strategy. 
• Design and Layout Planning: Stacking plans can also be used to plan or visualize layout modifications for tenant improvements. 

While stacking plans are a great asset for CRE management, maintaining them can be challenging, especially when relying on PDF stacking plans which require time-consuming and error-prone manual updates. Additionally, stacking plans that lack essential information might fail to provide a complete picture of a property’s financial stability. Using specialized software to generate digital real estate stacking plans can make all the difference.

The Benefits of Stacking Plan Automation Software

Part of the CommercialEdge Revenue Suite, Deal Manager is a CRE pipeline management solution designed to accelerate the leasing process. The platform provides asset management and leasing teams with automatically generated, interactive and printable real estate stacking plans. These plans pull lease and tenant data directly from Yardi Voyager, including expiration dates, space availability, encumbrances and lease abstracts.

The Deal Manager connected solution empowers CRE professionals to make informed leasing decisions faster, optimize occupancy strategies and market their spaces more efficiently, including benefits such as: 

• Real-Time Updates: Real-time data sync keeps stacking plans up-to-date, reducing the time and effort spent manually updating them. 
• Collaborative Editing: Multiple authorized users can access, update and download stacking plans, improving cross-department visibility and workflow efficiency. 
• Enhanced Data Security: Storing stacking plans in a secure database protects the documents against unauthorized use and security breaches. 
• Seamless System Integration: Connecting the stacking plan software with the Yardi property and deal management platforms enables real-time syncing of tenant and lease details, ensuring a single source of truth.
• Fully Featured Mobile App: The native Deal Manager mobile app gives brokers easy access to stacking plans, keeping them productive from anywhere.

Conclusion 

Digital stacking plans provide a competitive edge in commercial real estate by offering real-time property insights, streamlining leasing workflows and driving portfolio performance. With solutions like Deal Manager, owners, property managers and brokers gain a powerful tool to make smarter leasing and asset management decisions.