An Office Rent Has a Shadow. And It Costs Money
- Rent and building class can make two office buildings in Mexico seem comparable until maintenance costs enter the equation.
In the office real estate market, maintenance fees tend to be overshadowed by rent. But in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, that cost now accounts for between 11% and 15% of what a company spends each month on the two combined¹.
Rent and maintenance, however, have not moved at the same pace over the past three years. After adjusting for inflation, rents in Mexico City fell 7.9%, while maintenance fees declined just 1.2%. In Guadalajara, rents rose 2.4% while maintenance fell 1.9%. Monterrey, meanwhile, posted increases of 3.3% and 1%, respectively².
Those shifts affected maintenance’s share of the bill differently. In Mexico City, it rose from 14.4% to 15.3% because rents fell much more than maintenance fees. In Guadalajara, it declined from 13.9% to 13.4%, and in Monterrey from 11.7% to 11.5%, as rents increased more than maintenance in both markets.
For a company, the difference determines how much rent influences the total bill, since the greater maintenance’s share, the smaller the effect of a change in rent on that bill. A reduction in rent therefore generates proportionally smaller savings if maintenance falls less, while an increase produces a smaller rise if maintenance grows less.
The comparison between the two periods also indicates that maintenance fees do not necessarily move with rents. Between the second quarter of 2023 and the same period in 2026, how much one rose or fell offered almost no indication of what happened to the other³.
That behavior reflects the nature of the two payments. Rent is the price of space and responds largely to market conditions. It can therefore change with shifts in availability, demand, or competition for tenants. Maintenance, by contrast, covers costs necessary to operate the property, such as cleaning, security, elevators, equipment and common areas, which do not automatically change when the market moves. This limits how much changes in rent flow through to what an occupier pays, because the price of space can adjust, but the building still has to operate. As a result, part of the cost of occupying an office can remain relatively insulated from the conditions that determine the price of space. Looking only at rents can therefore provide an incomplete picture of how much an office actually becomes cheaper or more expensive for its occupier.
Maintenance, meanwhile, varies by class and submarket, although fee levels do not follow a uniform hierarchy. A+ buildings recorded the highest fees in all three cities. Still, while they exceeded classes A and B in Mexico City, they were virtually tied with class A in Monterrey, and class B offices in Guadalajara were more expensive than class A offices. There were also significant differences across submarkets. The gap between the submarket with the lowest fee and the one with the highest was 18% in Mexico City, 28% in Monterrey and 62% in Guadalajara.
The results thus add a second limitation to the usual way of comparing offices. If rent does not indicate how maintenance will move, class alone is also insufficient to indicate its level, meaning offices that are comparable by price and category are not necessarily so once maintenance fees are included. In that sense, the fee can alter the economic distance between spaces that appear similar when viewed solely through rent and class.
The comparison, therefore, does not end with rent. To explore buildings and submarkets using SiiLA data, visit SiiLA Market Analytics or email us at contacto@siila.com.mx.
¹ SiiLA calculations for the second quarter of 2026. Values were weighted by inventory and include market-submarket-class combinations with available rent and maintenance data.
² The 2023 values were expressed in second-quarter 2026 dollars using the U.S. CPI-U, and the results were weighted by inventory. The comparison includes only market-submarket-class combinations with available data in both periods.
³ The analysis includes 56 comparable market-submarket-class combinations with rent and maintenance data available for both periods. The Pearson correlation between real changes in rent and maintenance was 0.163 (p=0.23), while the Spearman correlation was 0.111 (p=0.414). Neither showed a statistically significant relationship between the two changes.
