Using Energy Data to Find Vacant Building | Office Hours
What if the most distressed buildings in your market don’t look distressed at all?
Some of the best off-market deals never hit LoopNet. They don’t show up in broker chatter. And on paper, they look “occupied.”
But the lights tell a different story.
In this breakdown, I dive into a fascinating strategy investors are using to uncover hidden vacancy by analyzing something most people ignore: energy usage. By comparing reported occupancy to actual electricity and utility consumption, you can spot buildings that are quietly bleeding—long before the market catches on.
You’ll learn how energy data becomes a proxy for real occupancy, why “phantom tenants” create leverage for buyers and brokers, and how combining public data sets can surface opportunities others never see.
If you’ve ever wondered how to find distressed commercial real estate before it’s marketed as distressed… this is the edge.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
Innovating Deal Search: The meeting covered a creative strategy of using New York City energy usage data and public financial filings to identify “phantom vacancies” and financial distress in office buildings—giving investors an edge in finding off-market deals.
Community & Education: Tyler Cauble launched updates about the CRE accelerator mastermind, emphasizing personalized education, affordable resources, and networking opportunities for investors.
Leveraging Technology: The team discussed integrating AI tools such as ChatGPT for streamlining property document review, underwriting, and lease abstractions—vastly increasing efficiency in property analysis.
Personal and Project Updates: Tyler shared his experiences from his honeymoon and the opening of his hotel, along with an upcoming documentary on the lengthy hotel project.
Action and Goal-Setting: Attendees were encouraged to set clear commercial real estate goals for the year and take specific action steps toward those goals.
Regular Office Hours: Weekly live office hours were announced, offering ongoing community Q&A and deal review sessions.
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Episode Transcript:
Tyler Cauble 0:00
This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast. It is our first episode of 2026 we're back at it, boys and girls, I'm your host, Tyler Cobble. As always, we are live from the cobble group studios in Nashville, Tennessee, back for another round of office hours. You guys have questions about commercial real estate, this is where we dive into your commercial real estate deals. There is a link in the description below to where you can actually submit deals for to me to be reviewed in these calls. So if you have a deal you want me to take a look at it, check that out. We could dive into your questions. It's a live Q and A we'll be covering whatever you guys want to dive into today. We have a pretty interesting article, or, I guess, thread from Reddit today. You guys know I love sharing really interesting strategies, creative strategies, with you all on how to go about finding deals, putting these deals together, making them work. The strategy that we're gonna be diving into today is one for finding deals that's incredibly creative. I've never actually seen anything like it before. And it's, it's, it's really interesting. So stick around. We're gonna have some fun with it, catching you guys up on where I've been. Obviously, I have been out of office for the past month. I take my 30 day sabbatical every single year. This year was a little bit different, because I got married back in November, so we went to Japan for our honeymoon over December, which was a lot of fun. If you've never been to that country, it is a totally different world. Had a phenomenal time, and really got to explore just very different urban environments, which was which was really neat, especially coming from the world of commercial real estate, seeing how differently cities can be and function incredibly well. I mean, the way that their their mass transit system, works, it's flawless for the most part. It's unbelievably clean. There's no trash anywhere. Everybody has their own personal responsibility to take your own trash home, you know, like little things like that. There's 30 million people in Tokyo, which is three times the size of New York City. But it felt like, because everything was so efficient and so well run, it felt like we were actually in like Chattanooga, right in terms of just the the overwhelm of the population or the noise, because it was so quiet, it's kind of wild. We also saw a lot of very beautiful buildings, very interesting buildings, and that was one thing that ended up breaking down for the accelerator mastermind, I took a ton of pictures while I was there. So we went through all of these different building types and building facades and designs that seem to be relatively common over there, that I hardly see over here, that are beautiful ways of or I guess they're brilliant ways of beautifying a building relatively inexpensively. There was this one Prada building in Seoul, South Korea, that really stands out to me, in terms of it was like basically an Ephesus or block building, right, and about six inches off of it, they had this kind of metal webbing almost that just kind of covered the building. Relatively inexpensive. It was probably about an inch wide, right, and the shadows cast on it created a lot of depth. So it was a very interesting building design. Let's see, we just released our in person event dates for the year for the accelerator mastermind. We do allow non members, I think I don't know, five or 10 seats to come to those events. So feel free to stay tuned for that. Check those out. If you're not on our mailing list. Anytime you download the deal analysis toolkit or something in my on the YouTube channel here, you get added to that mailing list. That is where we will send those out. So they are on a first come first serve basis. Obviously, with only five or 10 seats, they sell out really, really quickly. We tend to keep the mastermind events members only, for a reason, right? Our hotel is finally opening in March. It has been four years, and we are doing basically an entire documentary on this whole project. I mean, I think that this video will probably end up being 45 or 60 minutes long, diving into everything from the very beginning until opening day. And I'm going to run you guys through all of the the ups and the downs, what we would have done differently, what went wrong, what went right, right? There's a lot of you know, when a project drags on, it's very easy to talk about the downsides, but we've, you know, the project's gone up in value. Sofia. Substantially, and we haven't even had to do anything with it yet, right? That's one of the best parts about buying commercial real estate in the right area and then just letting it set right. It's almost like land banking. And then, you know, I've teased this a little bit, but we are working on the educational platform launch, right? We're building this entire university style ecosystem for commercial real estate education that is going to go more in depth on educating and training you all in an interactive way than has ever been done before in commercial real estate. I'm really, really excited for it. This is exactly like I wish that I had had this when I was first getting started. Keep keep an eye out for that. I mean, I think that we might start launching some of those courses in the next 30 days, and they're going to be incredibly affordable. That was, that was what was very important for me as we were building this was to make it affordable and accessible for anybody that's interested in commercial real estate. He estate. Here's here's the thing. You don't have to have money to be successful in this game. You really don't like I know that it's it's probably easier for me to say than it is for some people to hear. But when I got started in commercial real estate, I didn't have any money. I didn't come from family money that just bought me my first building and got me started, right? I had nothing. I rolled my commissions in on my first deal as my equity contribution, and I raised capital from investors. Now, because of everything that I've learned over the past, you know, 12 years of being in commercial real estate, it's become very easy for me to teach other people how to do this. We had a member of the mastermind joined back in November, who closed his first deal on December 31 His name is Matt. We're working on getting him to come onto the show. Really excited to share his story with you all, because he came out of pocket $0 he negotiated 100% seller financing within like 45 days of joining our group, got his first property before the end of the year, and is absolutely crushing it. So I can't wait for you guys to hear how he went about doing that. So that's a little bit about what I've been up to the last 30 days. Excited to be getting back into the content with you all. Hopefully you guys have been enjoying some of the different styles of videos that we've been putting out. You know, we did the McDonald's versus Starbucks video we did the economics behind parking lots. We're going to be bringing you more of that type of content this year, alongside stories of the deal. So it's either going to be these in depth, you know, almost documentary style videos on interesting concepts, or we're going to be sitting down with investors and going through their projects, learning how they did it. Right? That's my two those are my two favorite types of content to make you guys seem to really love them a lot. So we're just going to focus on creating those, of course, along with all of the live streaming that we do here. Question of the day, I want to hear from you guys in the comments, what is your number one goal in commercial real estate this year, and what action or actions are you taking to make it happen? I want to know. Drop them in the chat. Let's have a discussion around that. Because it's January. If you don't have a goal for commercial real estate this year, you're not going to hit it, right? You got to know where you're going in order to start walking that way. And you know, even if it's I want to buy my first commercial property this year, okay, great. What are the actions that you're taking to make that happen, because it's one thing to have the goal, right? You can't just take the action and all of a sudden the commercial property want to buy falls in your lap. So if you want to buy your first commercial property this year, how many brokers are you meeting with on a weekly basis? Have you put together your Buy Box? Are you sending that out to brokers? How many deals are you underwriting on a daily or weekly basis? How many deals are you reviewing? How many Capital Partners are you having conversations with? How many lenders do you have on your roster? If I if I told you, right now, I've got the perfect deal. All you have to do is get it financed. How many lenders are you going to have to call before you can get that deal done, all that is so important to have lined up. So what actions can you be taking to make that happen? Now? What's going on? Eddie's jumping up in the comments saying, Good morning, getting vacant spaces rented. Have two single offices and one retail space open at the moment. Going to renovate the retail space to make it more appealing and easier for a tenant to move in quicker. I love that sometimes, you know, we get we get caught up as commercial real estate investors thinking, Oh, well, somebody's going to want to renovate this space and do whatever they want with it,
Tyler Cauble 9:32
more often than not, especially if it's like a smaller space, most tenants just want to move in. Man, they just want to move in, get the keys today and not worry about a thing you know, that's a that's a hard lesson I've had to learn over the years, because sometimes you want to just leave a space untouched, because you don't want to spend the money until the tenants actually, you know, coming in. But sometimes tenants just don't have the capability of visualizing what a space can be like we can, right? Right? And so you'd be amazed at how far a new, you know, a new LVP on the floor and new paint on the walls will go towards getting those spaces least. All right, let's dive into this article or this Reddit thread on Gosh, I'm having to remember how to how to get over, how to switch cameras, guys, it's been, it's been 30 days I've slept since the last time I've done this. Okay, this is really cool. So the title of this thread is, I used New York City Energy data to find phantom vacancy in office buildings, the results were wild. This is really cool, by the way. So the thread says I've been experimenting with a way to spot off market distress in New York City commercial real estate using public data. And I figured this sub might appreciate the logic. A lot of distressed buildings don't look distressed in listings or broker chatter until very late, owners often come up the often keep up the appearance of occupancy and stability even after tenants have quietly disappeared. So I tried to answer a narrow question, can you detect hidden vacancy and financial stress before it shows up on loop net or costar? The experiment used two totally separate public data sets that normally don't talk to each other. Signal. One was energy usage as a proxy for real occupancy. New York City requires large buildings to report annual energy benchmarking data that gives electricity and fuel usage normalized by building size and type, so they then compared expected energy usage based on peer buildings and actual reported usage. This is really, really cool. When a building that claims to be occupied shows energy usage closer to a vacant warehouse than an active office or multifamily asset, that's a red flag. I would actually say it's a green flag. Maybe there's an opportunity there. You could jump in and buy a building in distress, not proof of vacancy, but a strong something's off here signal. I started calling this phantom occupancy signal. Two was quiet financial stress. Separately, I pulled New York City public records and looked for early stage distress indicators, list pendants, filings, tax liens, mortgages past maturity with no refi recorded again. None of these allowed me to deal as imminent, but they're often precursors. So this person ended up writing a Python script to cross reference those data sets. And let's see, those properties tended to be partially or fully vacant, despite being marketed as occupied, owned by LLCs that hadn't yet engaged brokers very early in the Oh phase before widespread exposure. So one thing that I could see this being incredibly useful for is just because a office building has a lease with a tenant, and that tenant is paying rent, that tenant might have closed their business, that will close that location, moved everybody to another location, or they're now working from home, so they're still paying rent, but they're not going to be using any utilities, Right? So your your utility usage will be lower, and that tells you, like, yeah, you might not necessarily have an economic vacancy, but you might have an effective vacancy, and that's something to keep in mind. Let's see the hit rate on this was top on the top tier was meaningfully higher than random cold outreach. Energy data is surprisingly useful, but only as a time series, one year snapshots lie. The stress is best modeled probabilistically, not as a binary. Yes, no. Public data still has alpha if you combine data sets that weren't designed to be combined. This is really interesting, right diving into utilizing public data to determine whether or not buildings are vacant. Now, I don't know that every single city is going to have public utility data like this. All right, it may be a little bit different, but I know in Nashville, you can typically call and get historic energy usage for a building. So might be interesting to start calling on buildings that you think might be vacant and seeing if you can glean any sort of energy usage out of them, because then that will tell you whether they're vacant or not. Let's see this comment saying this is genuinely clever work. Combining ll 84 energy data with ACRIS filings to create a distress signal is exactly the kind of cross data. Of cross data set thinking that most people never attempt this. As soon as I started reading this, I was like, This sounds like AI, so I'm going to skip over that comment. Brilliant idea. You should do this for daycare centers. Now I raised this with one of the research firms I work with, brilliant on your part, and I wish for you clean data and clear back testing. Novice question, what is the end game here, to short the owner or securities issued by the building before it gets downgraded, to make low ball rental offers, to find new space for an expanding business, to find properties before they hit the market. I mean, here's the thing you could use this. For all sorts of different things, like, if you're a commercial real estate broker and you're using this data, maybe you can, it'll help you negotiate a better rental rate for your client, if that's trying to lease space there, because you know how vacant the building is, that landlord is going to be in a more distressed situation where they just need to get a lease done to help stop some of the bleeding. If you are looking to buy office buildings, you know that that owner is up against the clock because they're not making any money on it, right? There's a lot of optionality there with regards to how you can kind of approach this. Let's see. Jessica is saying, I want to close my first commercial deal and improve my systems. Awesome. Jessica would love to know what actions are you taking towards that now, and what are you going to do to make sure that that's going to happen by the end of this year? Right? I would love to have a discussion with you on what we can be doing to make that happen. So I don't know. What do you guys think is, is looking up the energy usage, finding the energy data, an interesting way of going about and determining buildings that are worth making offers on. Is this something that you would use in your day to day? Or is it just a Oh, that's interesting. That's cool that somebody else is doing that. We'll just let them keep doing that. Let's see this other common saying. Are you able to get water too depending on building type? Electricity is likely to be left on to maintain heat security, etc. But if a tenant is absent, no one will run water just to run it pretty interesting. So, yeah, I don't know it's it's a very interesting world out there when it comes to finding these deals. You know what I've found, especially in the past 12 months, commercial real estate technology is moving at lightning speed, and the way in which we are learning today is or finding deals or doing deals or raising capital, everything's changing really quickly. It's it's been really tough to figure out what we should even be paying attention to. So that's one thing I'm working on right now. Is like, what is what AI is worth working on in commercial real estate? What data sets, or what new tech should we be paying attention to? The interesting thing is, if you can get the data, you now don't have to parse through it, because you could take it, drop it into chat, GBT, and have it basically cross reference that way. Like this person used Python, they created their own script to go and do that, but honestly, you might be able to just drop that into chat, GBT and have it cross reference all of that information for you, right? So now you're not having to really spend hours and hours to really dig into this data, you could have it done in five minutes, right? I mean, it's things are going to start moving a whole lot faster, you know, you you could take all of the data that you get on a property and have it review the have chat GBT, review the rent roll, have it put together, you know, information on surrounding properties. I mean, compare it to everything that's going on around it, and tell you the pros and cons of you know, the data behind it, right which it's it's not something that we're entirely leaning on in terms of how we're approaching our underwriting, but it certainly is something that we're doing on every single property that we have now, everything is going into not, I mean, not everything, like, we're not putting tax returns on, like, private data in there, but rent rolls, you know, leases. We're putting everything in there, and it's helping us create lease abstracts, pulling out all of the very important data right there in two minutes, you know, stuff that used to take an admin, you know, half a day when we were buying properties to put all that stuff together. Now takes less than an hour. It's pretty wild to think about what commercial real estate could look like this year, by the end of this year, to be honest with you guys, oh man, it's gonna be a wild one. Anyways. Appreciate you guys for joining me on this week's office hours. We're going live every tuesday, 8:30am Central Standard Time, bringing you guys me for live Q and A to dive into whatever you guys want to hope you guys are kicking the year off right. Excited to be with you again. Appreciate you all, and we'll see you in the next one.
Tyler Cauble 19:22
You episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate you'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you, you'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more you.