Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 30 /Jul 10, 2026
Why owners lose more on operations than rent
Will Curtis, Crossed Sabers Commercial Real Estate
Jul 10, 2026 /Real Estate, Cities & Housing
Why owners lose more on operations than rent
Will Curtis is the founder and principal broker of Crossed Sabers Commercial Real Estate in San Antonio, with a hand in more than a billion dollars of transactions. Before real estate he spent seven years keeping Army Apache helicopters flying. He brought a maintenance crew's discipline to a business that celebrates the deal and forgets the decades after it.
Will Curtis, Founder, Principal Broker, Crossed Sabers Commercial Real Estate
In this conversation
The Apache crew years and what they taught Will about maintenance as a source of value.
How hybrid work changed who leases office space, and the story of the Nebraska assignment he turned down.
Why he expects the office to be rethought rather than abandoned.
His lightning round: favorite building in San Antonio, the most underrated role in the business, and the trend nobody is watching.
Many owners, especially newer investors, don't think about operations as they go through the process.
Will Curtis
Chapters
Apache crews and commercial real estate
From helicopter maintenance to commercial brokerage.
What draws people back
What is drawing companies back to offices, and what landlords must do.
Rethinking the office
Whether the office building itself needs to be rethought.
By the numbers
U.S. office vacancy rate
Will says landlords hold face rents and give the difference away in concessions. This is the vacancy they are hiding.
Source: Moody's Analytics office vacancy data, 2019 to 2025 ↗Standing out in a relationship business
Standing out in an industry that runs on who you know.
Brick and mortar in twenty years
What stays true about physical space twenty years out.
What a young Will should know
Will's advice for someone entering real estate today.
Those property managers, operational professionals, are the ones that actually make the building make money long term.
Will Curtis
Takeaways
Newer investors either ignore operations or trust the operations people too much. The building makes or loses money for decades after closing, and property managers are who make it money.
Landlords are holding face rents and giving the difference away in concessions: free rent and tenant improvements that cut the effective rate in half, because the loan depends on the paper number.
There will always be room for person-to-person relationships and for buildings built 150 years ago, whatever AI does to the paperwork.
As much as AI is gonna do a lot for us, there's always gonna be room for a person-to-person relationship.
Will Curtis