Landlord Survival Guide for 2025: Your Tenants Are Your Lifeline

Landlord Survival Guide for 2025: Your Tenants Are Your Lifeline

By Tom Marchesello, Founder & President of Magnet

March 31, 2025

Listen up: if you’re a landlord still fixated on rent checks and occupancy rates, 2025 will eat you alive. I’m Tom Marchesello, a U.S. Military Veteran and head of Magnet, a Charlotte-based CRE outfit. Here’s the brutal truth—your survival hinges on one metric: your tenants’ success. Forget everything else. Here’s what you do right now to make it through.

Stop Playing Landlord, Start Playing Partner

You’re not in real estate—you’re in the tenant success game. Your NOI doesn’t mean squat if your tenants’ sales tank. A 10% boost in their revenue beats a 1% rent hike every time. Data backs it: properties where landlords help tenants grow sales crush the market by 34%. Those who don’t? They’re down 22% in five years. This isn’t optional—it’s do or die. Data from NAREIT indicates that Residential Supply Demand Balance is at equilibrium. But Retail / Commercial / Industrial is oversupply and lower demand due to high prices and bad economic concerns. This requires thoughtful considerations.

Action Plan: Today, Not Tomorrow

1. Know Their Numbers: Get inside your tenants’ businesses. What’s their weekly sales? Inventory turnover? Staffing gaps? If you don’t know, you’re blind. Call their managers. Walk their stores. Mystery-shop your own plaza.

   
   

2. Fix What’s Broken: Spot the weak links. Understaffed on peak days? Push them to hire. Lousy marketing? Hook them up with a local ad guy. Sluggish foot traffic? Test a pop-up event. Their wins are your wins.

   
   

3. Track Sales Like Your Life Depends On It: Start every meeting with tenant performance. If they’re up, renewals are easy. If they’re down, no lease trick saves you.

Ditch the Old Playbook

E-commerce and post-pandemic shifts have killed the middle ground. Average landlords are toast by 2026. You can’t just collect rent and call it a day—entitlement’s a death sentence. Become their business consultant. Learn their customers, their margins, their traffic hacks. Your leasing guy isn’t the MVP—it’s whoever’s in the trenches with your tenants.

Why It Works

When tenants thrive, you don’t negotiate renewals—they beg to stay. Look at Best Buy’s turnaround: landlords who collaborated kept their anchors; the rest got seasonal ghost towns. Your plaza isn’t a building—it’s an ecosystem. Build it right, and the whole outshines the parts.

Survive 2025: The Bottom Line

Step 1: Meet every tenant this week. Ask: “How’s business? What’s holding you back?”

Step 2: Fix one problem per tenant by April. More sales, better ops—your call.

Step 3: Partner with Magnet. We’ve got the tools to turn your rent roll into a revenue engine.

You’re not leasing space—you’re betting on their success. Get it wrong, and you’re irrelevant by year-end. Get it right, and 2025’s your comeback story. Call us at Magnet—we’ll make it happen.

About the Author:

Tom Marchesello is the Founder & President of Magnet, a U.S. Military Veteran-owned CRE company in Charlotte, NC. We don’t just manage properties—we build winners. www.magnetam.com