A stacking plan is a floor-by-floor visual representation of every tenancy in a multi-tenant office building, showing which tenant occupies which suite on which floor, the square footage of each lease, the lease expiration date, and often the in-place rent. The format is typically a vertical bar chart with each floor as a horizontal band, colour-coded by tenant or by lease expiry year, so that the entire tenancy profile of the building is visible at a glance.
Asset managers, leasing brokers, and lenders all rely on stacking plans because a rent roll spreadsheet contains the same data but lacks the spatial context that drives leasing and risk decisions.
The most important insight a stacking plan provides is contiguous block availability. When a large tenant is searching for 40,000 square feet across two or three contiguous floors, the stacking plan immediately reveals whether the building can accommodate that requirement, either now through existing vacancy or in the near term through upcoming lease expirations that could be combined into a block.
Buildings that can offer large contiguous blocks command premium rents and attract credit tenants that smaller fragmented buildings cannot access, making the stacking plan a strategic leasing tool as well as a reporting document.
Rollover cliff risk is the second critical reading of a stacking plan. When multiple leases expire in the same year, particularly if those leases represent a significant share of the building's total income, the building faces a concentration of re-leasing risk that can impair cash flow projections and covenant compliance.
Lenders reviewing stacking plans during underwriting look specifically for rollover concentration: a building where 40% of its income expires in a single year presents a materially different risk profile from one with evenly staggered expirations. The weighted average lease term (WALT) is the summary metric, but the stacking plan reveals the distribution behind the average.
Leasing strategy is derived directly from the stacking plan. An asset manager reviewing a stacking plan with a large vacancy on floors 12 through 14 and a small tenant on floor 15 whose lease expires next year will often choose not to renew the small tenant in order to assemble a four-floor contiguous block, a decision that sacrifices short-term income for a higher-value leasing outcome.
Similarly, a stacking plan showing that a building's strongest credit tenant is on floors 3 through 6 with a lease expiring in 18 months triggers an early renewal negotiation to de-risk the rollover before it hits the market. These are asset-management decisions that only make sense with the spatial context the stacking plan provides.
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