Somewhere in your janitorial and HVAC contracts is a frequency schedule. Floors cleaned nightly. Filters changed monthly. Landscaping maintained weekly. That schedule was almost certainly negotiated years ago, based on a building that looked nothing like the one you're running today.

The Assumption Nobody's Revisited

Buildings that used to run near full occupancy are averaging around half full across most major markets, even after two years of return-to-office pressure and in premium buildings. But the workforce that came back didn't come back the same way. Most policies are hybrid now, two to four days a week, which means the building is full on Tuesday and half-empty on Friday. A cleaning schedule built for five nights of full occupancy is running against a building whose population now swings by day of week and the contract never moved with it.

Here's the uncomfortable part: occupancy climbing back can make this problem harder to see, not easier. Rising Tuesday-through-Thursday traffic creates the impression that the building is back, while Monday and Friday are still running at a fraction of peak and quietly stay on the same nightly schedule. Returning to the office didn't fix the mismatch. It just moved it from the weekly average to the days of the week nobody's watching.

This isn't a story about vendors overcharging. Most of these contracts were reasonable when they were signed. The problem is that nobody's gone back to prove the assumptions behind them are wrong, and without that proof, renegotiating feels like a fight nobody wants to start.

It's worth being specific about why this gap is so persistent. A frequency written into a five-year master service agreement doesn't get revisited on its own schedule. It gets revisited when someone brings a reason to the table, and "the building feels emptier than it used to" isn't a reason a vendor or a procurement team can act on. What they can act on is occupancy data mapped directly against contracted service levels, with a dollar figure attached to the gap. Until that exists, the default is to leave the contract exactly as it is, because changing it without proof carries more risk than leaving it alone.

Why Nobody's Made the Case Yet

Reducing a service frequency means renegotiating a contract, which means friction with a vendor and often friction with procurement too. That's real work, and FM leaders don't take on real work speculatively. What's missing is the data that would justify starting the conversation in the first place.

I've watched this play out the same way more than once. Everyone in the room agrees, informally, that the building doesn't need nightly service five days a week. Nobody's willing to be the one who proposes a change without a number behind it, because if the change goes wrong, that's now their decision on record.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Take a 400,000 square foot corporate campus that shifted to a three-day-a-week hybrid schedule in 2022. The janitorial contract, signed in 2019, still specifies nightly full-floor cleaning across the entire footprint, five days a week. Occupancy data shows the building averages around 50 percent capacity across the week; higher than it's been since 2019, but the pattern underneath the average is stubbornly hybrid: near-full Tuesday through Thursday, closer to 25 percent on Mondays and Fridays.

Nobody made a conscious decision to keep paying for five nights of full service on a building running at less than half capacity most of the week. The contract simply carried forward from a pre-pandemic baseline that nobody had a reason, or the data, to challenge. Once the occupancy numbers are laid next to the contracted frequency, the case for renegotiating writes itself. Before that, it's just a hunch nobody wanted to act on without proof.

A Way to Quantify This for Your Own Portfolio

You likely already have the data you need. Pull three things and put them side by side:

  • Badge swipe or occupancy sensor data for your three largest buildings over the last six months, averaged by day of week.
  • Current contracted service frequency for cleaning and HVAC filtration on those same buildings.
  • The date those frequencies were last renegotiated. If it predates 2021, that's your answer before you even look at the occupancy numbers.

Lay those next to each other and the mismatch is usually obvious within minutes. The harder part is turning that gap into a specific dollar figure you can bring to a vendor conversation, which is where most FM leaders stop because they don't have the modeling to go further alone.

What Comes Next

This is exactly the kind of finding a Portfolio Intelligence Assessment is built to quantify with enough precision to actually renegotiate on. If you already suspect your service frequencies are out of step with how your buildings are actually used, that instinct is probably right. The question is whether you have the number to act on it.