Ask a finance team how they arrived at next year's facilities budget and the honest answer, most of the time, is that they took this year's and adjusted it. Ask the same team how they arrived at next year's headcount plan and you will get a considerably longer answer involving several meetings and a defended justification for every position.
This asymmetry is strange, because for organizations that occupy meaningful physical space, facilities and operations typically sit directly behind payroll in size. It is not a rounding error. It is usually the second thing on the list, and it is the only major recurring commitment that is renewed rather than examined.
Why it escapes scrutiny
Four reasons, and none of them are that anybody is being careless.
It is fragmented across the ledger. There is often no single account that contains the facilities number. Utilities sit in one place, contracted services in another, small repairs are charged to departmental budgets, capital work that is functionally maintenance sits in a capital account, and in house staff sit in payroll. Nobody sees the total, so nobody reacts to the total. Reconstructing it is frequently the single most useful thing an outside party does in the first month of an engagement.
It has no natural advocate. A department head defends their headcount because it is theirs. Facilities cost is distributed, so a saving benefits everyone slightly and the effort of finding it falls entirely on one group. That is a poor incentive structure and it produces exactly the behavior you would predict.
Nothing forces the question. A vendor contract that renews automatically generates no decision point. There is no moment at which somebody has to look at it, and so nobody does, sometimes for many years past the point where the terms stopped being competitive.
Comparison is genuinely hard. Benchmarks in this field are weak. Cost per square foot varies legitimately with age, systems, climate, hours, density and use type, so a published figure is easy to dismiss, and it usually deserves to be dismissed. The result is that the comparison gets abandoned rather than done properly.
The fourth reason is the one worth attacking
The first three are structural and hard to change. The fourth is a technical problem with a technical answer: normalize before comparing.
You cannot usefully compare your cost per square foot to an industry average. You can compare a building to itself over time, controlled for weather and occupancy. You can compare buildings within your own portfolio, where the accounting is consistent and the differences in use type are known. You can compare the ratio of planned to reactive maintenance, which is far more portable across contexts than absolute cost because it is a measure of method rather than of circumstance.
That last one is the most diagnostic number in the discipline and most operations do not know theirs. Reactive work is often not flagged as reactive in the work order system, so calculating it requires classifying history rather than running a report. It is worth the effort. An operation running a high reactive share is not just spending more per unit of work, it is also consuming its assets faster, and both effects compound.
What examining it actually looks like
Not a cost cutting exercise. Cost cutting exercises in facilities have a well documented pattern: the number drops, the reactive share rises over the following eighteen months, and total cost returns to trend within about three years, having consumed some asset life on the way. Cuts that do not change method do not persist.
What works is slower and less satisfying to announce. Rebuild the true total. Classify the work. Test the contracts against the market. Move a defined share of work from reactive to planned and measure whether the reactive share actually falls. Each step produces a number you can defend, which matters, because the main obstacle to funding this work is that its benefits are diffuse and its costs are immediate.
A note on measurement
Most of what is described here is an analysis problem before it is an operations problem, and the analysis depends on assembling data from systems that were not designed to talk to each other. Doing that once, for an engagement, is consulting work. Doing it permanently, so the organization can see its own numbers without commissioning a study each time, is a build, and it needs analytics and reporting developers rather than consultants. We think the distinction is worth respecting. A spreadsheet handed over at the end of an engagement is not a reporting capability, and describing it as one sets the client up to be disappointed in about a year.
Where to start
If you want a single first step: assemble the true total for one site, from every account it touches, for the last three years. Not the budget, the actuals. Most organizations find something in that exercise alone, and it costs nothing but time. Once the number exists, the rest of the questions become askable.