Stacking Plan

A stacking plan shows a building floor by floor, with each tenant’s space, area, and lease expiration laid out visually. It is the standard way commercial real estate professionals read a building at a glance.

What it shows

Each floor is a horizontal band divided by tenant, usually annotated with:

• Tenant name
• Rentable square feet
• Lease expiration
• Vacant and available space
• Sometimes current rate, or whether an option exists

The value is spatial. A rent roll tells you the same facts in a table; a stacking plan lets you see that three adjacent suites on the fourth floor expire within eight months of each other, or that the only contiguous 20,000 square foot block sits across two floors.

What it is used for

Leasing. A prospect wanting 15,000 contiguous square feet either can or cannot be accommodated, and the stacking plan answers that immediately.

Rollover management. Clustered expirations are a risk that a chronological list obscures. Seeing them by floor makes concentration obvious.

Expansion planning. When a growing tenant needs more space, the question is what is adjacent and when it becomes available — a spatial question.

Valuation and financing. Buyers and lenders read stacking plans to assess tenant concentration and rollover exposure quickly.

Availability

An availability view is the same plan filtered to vacant space and upcoming expirations. It is what a leasing team works from, and it is only useful if it reflects current lease data rather than a slide someone updated last quarter.

That is the practical argument for generating stacking plans from the lease record rather than maintaining them separately: a stacking plan that disagrees with the rent roll is worse than none, because people act on it.

See area-based reporting for how stacking, rent roll, and rollover exposure derive from the same lease data.