Over the last decade, the commercial real estate industry has undergone a profound shift from a landlord-centric, transactional model to a tenant-centric, service-driven model. This was driven by regulatory reform, technological advancement, and rising tenant expectations has significantly increased the operational burden on property managers. As a result, the traditional 1:100 property manager-to-tenant ratio is no longer sustainable without digital intervention.
In 2015, property managers operated in a low-touch environment. Tenants signed long-term leases, interactions were infrequent, and responsibilities were limited—typically 5–10 tasks per tenant per year. Many teams relied on spreadsheets and reactive management. However, by 2025, the industry has shifted dramatically. Today’s managers face 20–30+ tasks per tenant annually, including:
Frequent lease events due to shorter terms and break clauses
Regulatory compliance with rising standards (e.g. MEES, GDPR, CMP)
Detailed financial transparency and service charge accountability
High-touch tenant engagement across multiple digital channels
Sustainability reporting and ESG collaboration
This has created a 6–10x increase in effort per tenant, dramatically lowering how many relationships a single manager can handle. The result is a structural breakdown of legacy ratios, with modern firms often capping workloads at 30–50 tenants per manager to preserve service quality.
Technology has been both a cause and a cure. While digital-native tenants now expect instant, always-on service, software adoption (post-2020) enabled managers to maintain near 1:100 ratios through automation and workflow centralisation. Looking forward, AI adoption is essential to offset further complexity—automating compliance, communications, and analytics—to sustainably increase efficiency and regain scalability empowering Property Managers to increase their ratio to 1:250 with the likes of Credia Plus.
The property manager to tenant ratio in product
As a property manager to tenant ratio is all about effective resource allocation it will live within the team performance dashboard on Insights. To find a ratio simply navigate to the Insights section,
Click on the Tenant Team Performance dashboard on the left hand menu
and it will be located on the Property manager tile as a complementary metric.
Please note that the property manager attendant ratio is only reflective of active tenancies this means that it will not apportion expired or archive tenants.