Facility benchmarks: cost per sqft and lease terms vs peers

What facility benchmarks are

Every night, Verinode rolls your active facilities, leases, and recurring costs up into a set of portfolio numbers, cost per square foot, owned versus leased mix, average lease term, escalation rate, notice period, CAM ratio, and a handful of others, and compares them against an anonymized cohort of peer operators. The goal is a straight answer to a question no lease binder can answer on its own: is what you're paying, and the terms you signed, in line with what similar restoration operators are paying, ahead of them, or worth a second look?

Verinode does not decide whether your rent is too high or your CAM charge is fair. It reads the facility, lease, and cost records you already have on file, computes the numbers, and puts the comparison in front of you, in Feed signals and in conversation with IQ, so you can decide whether to push back on a landlord, budget differently, or leave things as they are. As an independent data trust, Verinode never sells this data to carriers, and the comparison is never against a single other operator, only an aggregated cohort.

Where to find it

Open Facilities from the sidebar at /facilities. The portfolio numbers this article covers are built from what's already on the Footprint tab (your facility list), the Leases tab (rent and lease terms), and the Costs tab (recurring monthly bills), see Facility footprint, Leases: rent, terms, and renewal deadlines, and Facility recurring costs for how each of those is entered and displayed.

The comparison against peers, the actual "vs benchmark" moment, mostly shows up in two places:

• Your Feed, as signals that name a specific gap against the cohort, covered in Lease intelligence: escalations, notice windows, and landlord matching.
• IQ chat, where you can ask directly, "how does my cost per sqft compare to peers my size," and IQ answers from the same cohort figures described below.

The portfolio metrics Verinode computes

Verinode only computes a metric when it has enough of your own data to make the number mean something. Nothing here is invented from a partial record, a metric with no qualifying facilities, leases, or costs simply doesn't compute that night, and no stale or zero value gets sent anywhere.

Footprint metrics

• Cost per square foot (all-in, monthly). Your total monthly facility spend, active leases' base rent plus every active recurring cost, divided by your total active square footage. This is the headline number: what it costs you, per square foot, per month, to run your physical footprint.
• Owned share and leased share. What percentage of your active facilities you own outright versus lease or rent. Rented and leased facilities are grouped together for this comparison.
• Active facility count. How many active locations you're running, used to size your cohort so a four-location regional operator isn't measured against a single-branch shop.

Lease-term metrics

• Average lease term. The average length, in months, of your active leases, only counted for leases with both a term start and a term end on file.
• Average annual escalation. The average yearly rent increase built into your leases, only across leases with a Fixed % escalation type and a value entered. CPI-indexed, Stepped, and Other escalation types don't feed this particular average, CPI is index-driven rather than a flat rate, stepped is a per-period dollar jump, and Other is free-form and not numerically comparable across operators.
• Average notice period. How many days of advance notice your leases require before a renewal deadline, averaged across leases with a notice period actually entered.
• Security deposit, in months of rent. Your deposit expressed as a multiple of monthly rent (so a deposit of one and a half months' rent reads as 1.5), rather than a raw dollar figure, since a ratio compares across a cohort of different-sized leases far better than a dollar amount does.
• CAM as a percentage of base rent. Your common area maintenance charge divided by your base rent, again as a ratio so it holds up across leases of different sizes.
• Share of leases that auto-renew. What percentage of your active leases roll over automatically if you don't act, versus ones that require an active renewal decision each cycle.
• Non-rent operating cost per square foot. Your recurring costs, everything except base rent, divided by your total square footage. This is the "what does it cost to run the building beyond rent" number, isolated from the lease itself.

Cost-line breakdowns, per square foot

Each of the following computes as its own per-square-foot figure, and only when you actually have that cost type on file: Utilities, Internet, Security monitoring, Janitorial, Landscaping, Trash removal, Property tax, and Property insurance. Sublet income is deliberately excluded, it's income, not cost, and would create a nonsensical negative benchmark, and an "Other" cost line is excluded too, it's too unstructured across operators to compare meaningfully.

Cross-section metrics

• Square footage per team member. Your total active square footage divided by your active headcount, the "am I over- or under-spaced for my team" number. Only computes when you have both sqft and an active team on file.
• Equipment units per facility. Your active equipment count divided by your active facility count, how many pieces of equipment an operator your size typically runs per location.
• Equipment value per square foot. The purchase value of your active equipment fleet divided by your total square footage, how much capital is sitting in gear relative to the size of your footprint.
• Real estate cost as a percentage of revenue. Your total monthly facility cost divided by your monthly revenue. Verinode uses whichever revenue figure it has most confidently resolved for your business, a recent reported figure when one is on file, or the midpoint of your revenue range as a fallback when it isn't. If neither is available yet, this one metric is simply skipped for that night rather than computed against a guess.

How the underlying numbers are worked out

A few of the calculations are worth spelling out, since they explain why your number might differ from a back-of-envelope version:

• Total monthly cost is the sum of active leases' base rent plus active recurring costs. A recurring cost only counts if it has no end date, or an end date that hasn't passed yet, so a canceled service you're no longer paying doesn't linger in the total.
• Lease term in months is calculated from the exact span between term start and term end, using an average month length, not a rounded whole-number count. A lease running 25.5 months reads as 25.5, not rounded to 26.
• Escalation, notice period, deposit ratio, and CAM ratio are each averaged only across the leases that actually have that field populated. A lease missing a notice period, for instance, doesn't drag the average toward zero, it's simply left out of that particular average.

Contributing your data to the cohort

Every metric above only reaches the peer cohort if you've turned on Contribute to peer benchmarks in Settings, under data contribution, the same account-wide setting that governs every anonymized benchmark on the platform, not something specific to Facilities. With that setting on, your nightly portfolio numbers are hashed to your operator identity, never your name or company, and folded into a running average at up to four levels: nationwide, within your state, within your franchise group if you belong to one, and the combination of state and group. No individual operator's number is ever exposed on its own, only the aggregate.

This is the same "give data, get benchmarks" model used everywhere else on Verinode: your raw facility, lease, and cost records stay yours and are never sold to carriers or any third party. What flows out is an anonymized number that makes the cohort more useful for every contributing operator, including you.

Reading your numbers back against the cohort

Alongside contributing to the cohort, Verinode reads three of these metrics back for you specifically, resolved against the peer benchmark the moment they're needed: your cost per square foot, your square footage per team member, and your owned share of your footprint. For each one, Verinode has your current value plus the cohort's typical range, so a comparison can be drawn without ever showing you another operator's actual number.

A comparison only appears once enough peer operators have contributed the same metric for the comparison to be statistically meaningful, never against a single other operator's figure in isolation. Until then, or until your own record has enough on file to compute the value in the first place (no active facilities, no active leases, or no team on record, depending on the metric), Verinode simply omits that comparison rather than showing a number built on too little data.

Where the comparison actually shows up

Today, the peer comparison built on these metrics reaches you in two ways:

Feed signals. Once the underlying comparison clears the bar for a meaningful cohort, Verinode raises a card in your Feed when your terms sit meaningfully off the peer norm:

• Escalation rate above peer, when your fixed-percentage leases are escalating notably faster than the cohort.
• Notice period below peer, when your average notice window runs notably shorter than the cohort's.
• CAM above peer, when your common-area-maintenance pass-through runs notably above the cohort norm.
• Square footage per team member above peer, a signal that you may be holding more space than your team is using.
• Utility cost per square foot above peer, worth an audit of HVAC and lighting discipline.

Each of these is covered in full, including the exact wording and the recommendation attached to each, in Lease intelligence: escalations, notice windows, and landlord matching.

IQ chat. You can ask IQ directly how your cost per square foot, lease terms, or any of the metrics above compare to peers your size, and IQ answers from the same nightly numbers and cohort comparisons described in this article, without ever naming another operator or exposing a specific peer's figure.

Empty states

If you have no active facilities on record, none of this computes, there's nothing to roll up. Add your first facility from Footprint to start the underlying numbers flowing (see Facility footprint).

If you have facilities but no active leases, the lease-term metrics (average term, escalation, notice period, deposit, CAM, auto-renew share) simply don't compute for that night, the footprint metrics (cost per sqft, owned share, active count) still can, since they only need facilities and recurring costs, not a lease. Add a lease from a facility's Lease tab to bring the lease-term metrics online.

If you have facilities and leases but no team members on record, the square-footage-per-team-member comparison is skipped rather than shown as zero, since dividing by an empty headcount isn't a meaningful number.

Best-practice example

Say you run four facilities: two owned, two leased, with 38,000 total square feet and a monthly all-in facility cost of $41,000. That works out to roughly $1.08/sqft/month, the number Verinode computes and, if you've turned on peer contribution, folds into the cohort. Separately, one of your leases has a Fixed % escalation of 4.2% while the cohort's typical fixed-percentage lease escalates closer to 3.2%, which is enough of a gap that a Feed signal fires naming the difference and recommending you anchor your next renewal negotiation to the peer rate rather than the landlord's opening number. You didn't have to build either comparison yourself, both came from data already sitting in your facility and lease records.

Related articles

• Facilities: your operator footprint at a glance
• Facility footprint: offices, warehouses, and yards
• Leases: rent, terms, and renewal deadlines
• Lease intelligence: escalations, notice windows, and landlord matching
• Facility compliance: inspections, certificates, and renewals
• Understanding your margin
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark
• Benchmarks overview
• The decision workspace