Track your revenue trends against occupancy and market rates. Watch whether rising costs are eating into margins. Strong cash flow from growing revenue and controlled expenses is what lets you survive downturns.
you want to look at what's the trend line for your revenue, because that's going to create the margin. If you can continue to grow revenue, whether that's through higher market rates and higher occupancy, and then you want to understand what's the expenses. Have they absorbed a lot of these new higher expenses? And that creates your net operating income. And where is that trend going over the past 3 months? So you want to kind of see the trend lines going in the right direction, and then you want to see that path to cash flow. Because if you start getting the higher occupancy, you get your expenses under control, you get your market rates, then that cash flow number is hopefully not far away, because if you can get to cash flow, you can ride through the storm.
