“94% Occupied” — What Occupancy Figures Do and Don't Tell You.

An occupancy figure looks like a fact. It isn't — it's a summary, and summaries hide the details that determine whether rental income actually shows up in your account.

Private investment listings often lead with a confident number: "94% occupied". It reads like assurance. But occupancy is one of the easiest figures in property to present favourably, and one of the hardest for an investor to verify from the outside. Here's how to read it like someone who underwrites buildings for a living.

Occupancy is not income

A building can be 94% occupied and still underperform. Occupancy measures space with tenants in it — not rent collected, not rents paid on time, and not the quality of the leases behind those doors. A tenant paying below-market rent on a short lease with renewal risk contributes the same "occupancy" as a tenant locked into a five-year contract at market rates. The number treats them as identical. Your distributions will not.

The three questions the headline never answers

First: who are the tenants, and when do their leases expire? A building at 94% occupancy with the three largest tenants renewing next year is a different investment from the same figure with expiries spread over five years. Concentration of expiry is concentration of risk.

Second: are the rents being paid, or merely invoiced? There is a difference between leased space and collected rent. Ask about arrears and the collection rate. A building with a 98% collection rate on 90% occupancy is healthier than one with a 90% collection rate on 94%.

Third: what counts as "occupied"? Some buildings include storage areas, parking income, or space on rent-free fit-out periods. These are legitimate line items — but they are not the same as paying tenants, and the headline rarely breaks them out.

The tenancy schedule is the real document

Serious investors don't rely on the occupancy headline at all. They read the tenancy schedule: a unit-by-unit list showing the tenant, the leased area, the rent, the lease start and end, and the current payment status. It is usually a dull spreadsheet. It is also the single most informative document about a commercial property's income.

With a tenancy schedule you can see the lease expiry profile — how much income rolls over each year. You can see the weighted average lease term in plain form: how long until, on average, tenants could walk. And you can spot the anchor tenants: the two or three occupants whose departure would change the whole picture.

How to apply this on a shared-ownership listing

When you see an occupancy figure on a campaign page, treat it as the opening of a conversation, not the end of one. Open the document room and look for:

• The tenancy schedule or rent roll — if it isn't there, ask why.
• Lease expiry dates for the top tenants by income, not just by area.
• The collection rate over the last twelve months, not just the headline occupancy.
• Any vacant units: how long they have been empty, and what the realistic letting time is in that submarket.

A platform that shares these documents willingly is telling you something important about how it operates. One that hides them behind the headline is telling you something too.

The bottom line

"94% occupied" can describe a fortress or a façade. The difference is never in the number — it's in the leases behind it. Learn to read the schedule, and the headline stops being a sales line and becomes what it should be: a starting point for your own due diligence.

Capital at risk. Educational content, not financial advice.