In commercial real estate, a business plan is often treated as a document assembled for a lender, an investment committee, or an annual budget cycle. That is a narrow use of a tool that should do much more. A useful plan explains how a property is supposed to perform, which operating decisions drive that performance, and how those decisions translate into cash flow, risk, and return. When the plan is built from the property upward and then connected to portfolio and financing decisions, it becomes a management system rather than a compliance exercise.
The starting point is property-level reality. Rent rolls, lease abstracts, expense histories, capital needs, and market conditions all matter because they shape the assumptions that determine net operating income and residual value. A plan that projects rent growth without examining lease expirations, recovery structures, or tenant sales can look precise while resting on weak foundations. The same is true of expense forecasts that ignore common-area costs, taxes, insurance, or deferred maintenance. Good underwriting does not eliminate uncertainty; it exposes the assumptions that create it.
Biographical pages for Mark Tersigni describe a career spanning public accounting, corporate finance, and commercial real estate investment. Those pages state that he progressed from auditing investment companies to underwriting and managing multibillion-dollar real estate portfolios, with work centered on how assets are valued, financed, and positioned for sale. That background matters because a plan has to satisfy both the accountant’s need for defensible cash flow and the investor’s need for a clear return path. A plan that cannot survive a careful audit of its assumptions is not really a plan; it is a hope with a spreadsheet attached.
Open-Air Retail and Enclosed Malls Require Different Plans
Retail planning is a useful test case because the sector is often discussed in broad strokes. Open-air centers and enclosed malls can sit in the same portfolio, but they do not share the same operating logic. A grocery-anchored center depends on everyday-need traffic, convenient parking, and a tenant mix that supports frequent visits. An enclosed mall may depend on anchor department stores, longer dwell times, and different common-area and capital obligations. A September 2026 IBTimes article by Tom Robbins, outlining the investment case for open-air retail centers, draws on the experience of Mark Tersigni underwriting open-air centers and enclosed malls within the same multibillion-dollar portfolio.
The article’s argument is not that every retail property is thriving or that every mall is doomed. It is that format matters. The piece discusses parking, common-area costs, occupancy versus lease expirations, expense-sharing arrangements, capital needs, and anchor-lease provisions as factors that change a center’s economics. It also cautions against broad “retail is dying” narratives that flatten different assets into one story. A property-level plan should identify which tenants drive traffic, which leases control costs, which capital projects are discretionary, and which obligations survive a downturn. Answers differ by format, location, and tenant mix.
Build the Portfolio View From Property-Level Plans
Portfolio strategy should not be a separate exercise conducted after property plans are finished. The portfolio view is most useful when assembled from the bottom up: each asset has a plan, each plan has a return profile, and each return profile is tested against the portfolio’s objectives. That discipline helps owners compare assets on a consistent basis, decide where to invest capital, and identify candidates for hold, sale, or refinancing. It also reveals concentration risk that can be hidden when each property is reviewed in isolation.
The site for Complete Property Advisors, where Mark Tersigni is listed as founder, describes consulting and hourly analyst services for commercial real estate owners and investors. The listed focus areas include cash flow underwriting, hold/sell/refinance analysis, transaction due diligence support, Excel model creation and maintenance, comprehensive business planning, and employee training in tools such as Argus and Excel. Those services map closely to the work of connecting property operations to returns: the plan must be built, maintained, tested, and understood.
A bottom-up plan improves decision quality because it forces the team to reconcile competing assumptions. Leasing may want occupancy; asset management may want expense control; finance may want debt-service coverage; ownership may want a particular distribution or sale timing. The plan does not make those tensions disappear, but it makes them visible, so the conversation can focus on trade-offs rather than competing summaries.
Financing and Asset Management Belong in the Same Plan
Financing decisions are often treated as a separate workstream, but they are inseparable from the property plan. Debt maturity, refinancing risk, extension options, and loan covenants all affect what management can do with a property. A plan that assumes a sale at a convenient time without considering debt maturity is incomplete. A plan that assumes capital can be raised without testing lender appetite is similarly fragile. The financing section should connect property-level cash flow to coverage ratios, reserve requirements, and the realistic range of exit outcomes.
Asset management is where the plan meets the operating week. Budgets, quarterly reporting, lease approvals, capital projects, tax appeals, and hold/sell reviews are not administrative distractions; they are the mechanisms through which the plan is executed or abandoned. Public biographical pages state that he managed more than $1 billion of property-level commercial mortgages and provided analysis for refinancing, extension, and maturity decisions. They also state that he created and owned a corporate model used by private equity ownership to forecast investment returns, consolidating individual property plans into a corporate-level view. The plan should be the common reference point for operations, finance, and ownership.
Turn the Plan Into a Management Discipline
A business plan becomes valuable when it is used. That means assigning ownership to key assumptions, updating the plan when leases or financing change, and reviewing actual results against the plan with enough specificity to explain variances. It also means resisting the temptation to produce a polished document once a year and then manage from memory. The plan should be a living record of what the team believes and what would cause it to change course.
For owners evaluating outside support, the quality of the analytical process matters as much as the output. An additional profile link for Mark Tersigni is available through Crunchbase; because it is only a supplementary profile listing, it should be treated as a starting point for diligence rather than as a source for specific operating claims. Useful questions are practical: Can the analyst explain the assumptions? Can the model be audited? Does the plan distinguish between property-level operations and portfolio-level strategy? Those questions apply whether the work is done internally or with outside help.
The contact page for Mark Tersigni lists Columbus, Ohio, and is intended for getting in touch about commercial real estate, underwriting, asset management, finance, and investment strategy. Direct contact matters when the goal is to discuss a specific property plan rather than a generic market view. A plan connecting operations to returns has to be tailored to the asset, the debt, the lease structure, and the owner’s objectives. The details are where the return is made or lost.
Isabella Mendoza