Deferred maintenance is easy to miss in a property’s early performance because it rarely announces itself. A roof that has not been replaced, a parking lot that has been patched instead of resurfaced, or an HVAC system running past its useful life does not always reduce current occupancy. It does, however, change the economics of the asset over time. In commercial real estate, those changes eventually surface in net operating income, capital reserves, leasing velocity, financing proceeds, and sale pricing. The question for underwriting and asset management is not whether the work will be done, but who pays and when.
The Quiet Arithmetic of Deferred Maintenance
At the property level, deferred maintenance is a timing decision with a return consequence. Routine repairs and replacements may be pushed out to protect near-term cash flow, but the obligation remains. A landlord may keep a center looking occupied while the capital stack of necessary work grows behind the scenes. When the work is finally addressed, the cost may arrive during a refinancing, sale, tenant renewal, or softer leasing period. The resulting return is not only lower than it appeared; it is lower because earlier cash flow was borrowed from future capital.
Underwriters need to separate normal operating expenses from the capital required to keep a property competitive. That means reviewing roof condition, parking-lot condition, façade and common-area finishes, HVAC age, lighting, signage, drainage, and other building systems, then testing whether the reserve is adequate. A property with a thin capital reserve and a long list of pending work can look stable on a trailing NOI basis while carrying a hidden liability. Property-level analysis matters here because portfolio averages can conceal the specific assets where deferred work is accumulating.
Why Open-Air Retail and Enclosed Malls Tell Different Stories
Open-air retail centers and enclosed malls can both suffer from deferred maintenance, but the work shows up differently. In an open-air center, parking fields, roofs, façades, sidewalks, landscaping, and common-area lighting are visible to tenants and shoppers; grocery and everyday-need users depend on convenient access. In an enclosed mall, common-area systems, parking structures, escalators, and shared interior spaces add layers of cost and complexity. Anchor-lease provisions can shift responsibility in ways that are easy to misread from a high-level rent roll. A September 2026 IBTimes article bylined Tom Robbins outlines the investment case for open-air retail centers and discusses Mark Tersigni’s experience underwriting open-air centers and enclosed malls within the same multibillion-dollar portfolio. The article weighs grocery and everyday-need tenants against department-store malls, parking and common-area costs, occupancy versus lease expirations, expense sharing, capital needs, and anchor-lease provisions, while cautioning against broad “retail is dying” narratives.
Underwriting the Liability Before It Becomes a Variance
Public biographies describe Mark Tersigni as a real estate investment professional and Certified Public Accountant whose career spans public accounting, corporate finance, and commercial real estate investment. Those pages describe work centered on how assets are valued, financed, and positioned for sale, including underwriting and managing multibillion-dollar commercial real estate portfolios. That background is relevant to deferred maintenance because the issue sits at the intersection of accounting, property operations, and investment returns. The work is not simply to estimate a repair cost; it is to understand how that cost changes cash flow, debt capacity, and the timing of a sale.
A sound underwriting process treats deferred maintenance as part of the asset’s business plan rather than a footnote to the purchase price. Acquisition and disposition underwriting should test capital needs against lease rollover, tenant reimbursement provisions, and competitive positioning. If a roof replacement is likely within the hold period, the model should reflect it. If a parking lot is approaching resurfacing, the reserve should not be set as though the work is optional. Asset management then has to track the work, bid it, schedule it, and update the forecast when conditions change. The longer the work is deferred, the more likely it is to appear as a variance against the original plan.
Financing Turns Deferred Work Into a Maturity Event
Financing is where deferred maintenance often becomes visible to everyone. Lenders and rating agencies look at property condition, capital reserves, and the borrower’s ability to fund necessary work. A property with significant pending capital needs may support less debt or require additional reserves, which affects proceeds and flexibility. Public biographies note that Mark Tersigni is listed as founder of Complete Property Advisors, a Columbus, Ohio-based firm offering consulting and hourly analyst services to commercial real estate owners and investors, including cash flow underwriting, hold/sell/refinance analysis, due diligence support, Excel models, business planning, and employee training. Those services are the kind of analytical work that can expose deferred maintenance before it becomes a financing surprise.
Debt maturity is a particularly important checkpoint. A loan that was sized when the property was in better condition may not be refinanceable on the same terms if capital work has accumulated. The property-level mortgage analysis has to account for roof, parking, HVAC, and common-area needs alongside leasing and market assumptions. This is why reserve adequacy, capital planning, and refinancing strategy belong in the same conversation. Deferred maintenance does not stay a property-management issue forever; it becomes a financing issue when the lender, appraiser, or buyer applies a cost to the work that was postponed.
Portfolio Strategy and the Cost of Looking Healthy
Portfolio strategy can make deferred maintenance harder to see. A portfolio-level model may show stable returns even when individual assets are carrying different levels of capital need. The analytical fix is to consolidate property-level business plans into a portfolio view without losing the property-level detail. An additional profile link for Mark Tersigni is available on Crunchbase; it is best treated as a supplementary biographical reference rather than a source for property-level conclusions. For underwriting purposes, the relevant discipline is to keep the asset-level capital schedule visible and to test how it changes portfolio cash flow, debt service coverage, and disposition timing.
That discipline matters most when a portfolio contains a mix of open-air centers and enclosed malls. The assets may share a sponsor and a reporting package, but they do not share the same capital profile. An enclosed mall may carry common-area and anchor-lease complexities that an open-air center does not, while an open-air center may have parking-field and façade obligations that are easy to underestimate. A portfolio strategy that relies on aggregate occupancy or NOI can miss the assets where deferred work is quietly building. The better approach is to compare capital needs against lease expirations, tenant sales, and the property’s position in its trade area.
A Return Question, Not a Repair Question
Deferred maintenance ultimately shows up in long-term returns because it changes the relationship between current cash flow and future obligations. A property can distribute cash today and still be deteriorating in economic terms. When the work is finally funded, the return may be reduced by capital outlays, lost rent, lender reserves, or a lower sale price. For owners and investors who want to discuss a property-level review, the contact page for Mark Tersigni lists Columbus, Ohio and describes getting in touch about commercial real estate, underwriting, asset management, finance, and investment strategy. Underwriting should treat deferred maintenance as a return problem from the beginning, not as a repair bill that appears at the end.
Ankara robotics engineer who migrated to Berlin for synth festivals. Yusuf blogs on autonomous drones, Anatolian rock history, and the future of urban gardening. He practices breakdance footwork as micro-exercise between coding sprints.