How a Leading Property Management Firm Turns 17% of Waste Spend Into Recurring NOI

For multitenant portfolios, waste and recycling is one of the few line items where you get neither transparency, reliability, nor control.

A commercial real estate owner and property management firm operating a portfolio of multitenant properties across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic came to Sourgum managing waste and recycling the way nearly everyone does: paying haulers, allocating costs across tenants, and spending significant staff time coordinating service. It was a line item with no upside and demanded more administrative overhead than the team could manage.

By partnering with Sourgum, the firm brought its waste operations into one system—every service tracked, every vendor managed, every cost transparent—for full visibility and control across the portfolio. Sourgum managed the entire rollout, including onboarding every tenant directly, so the property management team didn't have to.

The Challenge: Fragmented, Time-Consuming Waste Operations

For the firm, waste management looked the same as it does for most multi-tenant property managers: a fragmented mix of haulers, an expense that sat on the operating budget, and a recurring administrative burden for the team responsible for cost allocation and tenant billing. Some properties had multiple haulers servicing the same site. Containers were accumulating. Truck traffic was higher than it needed to be. And every time a tenant question or billing dispute came up, it landed on the property management team.

There was no unified program, no opportunity to generate revenue from waste operations, and no easy way to change that without introducing significant new complexity.

The Solution: One System for the Whole Portfolio

Sourgum built a single waste and recycling program customized for their entire portfolio—one plan, one point of contact, one bill—designed around the three things the firm had been missing: transparency, reliability, and control. That involved:

• Consolidating vendors and containers. Working with a single partner meant less container clutter and reduced truck traffic across their properties.

• Standardizing service across the portfolio. Every tenant that wasn't required to arrange their own service was enrolled in a single plan, creating consistent standards and coverage across all locations.

• Turning an existing expense into income. The program generates recurring revenue that flows back to the property owner, adding a new net operating income (NOI) line from operations the property was already paying for.

• Streamlining tenant onboarding. Sourgum managed all communication, enrollment, and setup.

• Simplifying tenant billing. Ongoing direct billing removed allocation complexity and billing disputes from the property management team's workload entirely.

The Results: 17% of Waste Costs Converted into Recurring NOI

Across the portfolio, Sourgum converted 17% of what the firm had previously spent on waste and recycling into recurring net operating income (NOI) revenue. Tenants benefited too. The universal program allowed Sourgum to save tenants an average of 3% on their waste and recycling bills, making adoption straightforward and reducing pushback during rollout.

The program effectively turned an existing operating expense into income, with revenue flowing directly to the property owner and improving the NOI profile of each property.

Perhaps most meaningfully for the team, they didn't have to carry the operational burden themselves. Sourgum onboarded more than 40 tenants, established billing, and managed the entire transition from start to finish. The result was nearly half a full-time employee's worth of hours returned to the business each year, time redirected away from waste administration and toward higher-value operational priorities.

Takeaways

For multi-tenant commercial properties, waste is almost always overlooked and treated as a fixed cost. Sourgum changes that entirely. By consolidating service, Sourgum turns an operating expense into a recurring revenue stream while absorbing the operational complexity that makes waste programs difficult to run at scale.