Executive Summary
Most RIA owners never actually decided to lease an office. The firm grew, a lease felt like what a real advisory practice does, and the suite got signed years ago on assumptions nobody has revisited since. The belief underneath it is simple: clients expect a physical place, and a firm without one looks smaller than it is.
The data complicates that belief instead of confirming it. Advisors still say they prefer meeting clients in person, 73% call it their favored method against just 12% for video. But 17% of RIAs now list a private residence as their main office or one of their firm’s 25 largest branches, and the ones who made that move aren’t losing clients over it. The honest question isn’t whether clients want to meet in person sometimes. It’s whether the eighteen hundred square feet a firm pays for year round is actually earning that preference, or just sitting there because canceling the lease felt like a bigger decision than renewing it.
Karen runs an RIA in Plano, around $95 million, a team of four. She signed a lease on an 1,800 square foot suite near the tollway back in 2015, when the firm had two people and a receptionist desk that never got used. Nine years and two lease renewals later, a notice landed asking her to sign again. She realized she hadn’t actually looked at what the space cost her, or how often anyone was in it, since the year she signed it.
She ran the numbers for the first time that week. The suite cost more than she expected, and the team was in it maybe two days out of five.
Advisors Still Want To Meet Clients In Person
Start with what hasn’t changed, because the honest version of this argument has to. A study of 116 advisors conducted by Hartford Funds and covered by WealthManagement.com found 73% call in-person meetings their favored way to communicate with clients and prospects. Only 12% preferred video platforms. Advisors are interacting with clients at least weekly in 64% of cases, and almost all expect that pace to hold for the next five to ten years.
That’s a real preference and it isn’t going away. Anyone telling advisors to go fully remote because the technology allows it is skipping past what the advisors themselves say they want, and what plenty of clients want too, especially for the meetings that actually matter, a first meeting, a death in the family, a market scare. The question this post is asking isn’t whether in-person meetings matter. It’s whether a firm needs to carry a leased suite five days a week to have them a few times a month.
Most Of The Space Sits Empty Between Meetings
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud. The preference for in-person meetings is a preference for meetings, not for office space. A firm can want every important client conversation to happen face to face and still not need four walls sitting empty on a Tuesday.
Karen’s team was actually in the suite for client meetings maybe six or eight times a month. The other eighteen or nineteen business days, somebody was there because the lease said the space existed and it felt wrong to pay for it and not use it. That’s the pattern behind the Investment Adviser Association and Comply data showing 17% of RIAs now list a private residence as their main office or one of their firm’s 25 largest branches. Those aren’t firms skipping client meetings. They’re firms that stopped paying for a room to sit in between them.
For comparison, across all U.S. employers, 52% of employees now work hybrid, 27% work fully remote, and 21% are required onsite full time, according to Gallup data cited in the same Financial Planning reporting. RIAs are still well behind that broader shift. Some of that gap is compliance and culture, and some of it is just nobody running the numbers on what the lease is actually buying.
What A Dallas Office Suite Actually Costs Today
The number Karen hadn’t looked at in nine years turned out to be bigger than she remembered. The Dallas office market posted 26.8% vacancy in the first quarter of 2026, with overall direct asking rents at $36.51 per square foot, according to JLL research. An 1,800 square foot suite at that rate runs about $65,700 a year in base rent alone, before utilities, internet, cleaning, and the furniture and buildout that never shows up as a separate line item on anyone’s mental math.
That’s close to a full support-staff salary for a four-person firm, sitting empty most of the week. High vacancy usually means landlords will negotiate, shorter terms, built-out suites at a discount, sublease space from a firm that downsized. Karen’s building had three other suites sitting vacant on her floor alone. Nobody had mentioned that to her at renewal time, because nobody asked.
The Firms Already Operating Without One
None of this means every RIA should give up its office. A firm with a dozen employees, walk-in client traffic, or a service model built around drop-in visits has a different equation than a four-person team seeing clients by appointment. The point isn’t that offices are wrong. It’s that most firms never ran the comparison, they just kept what they had.
A firm actively hiring is a different case too. If the plan for the next two years involves bringing on associate advisors or building out a service team, a real office does work a home address can’t, it gives new hires a place to learn by watching, and it signals something to a candidate weighing offers. That’s a real reason to keep or even expand a lease. It’s just a different reason than the one most firms are actually running on, which is inertia. The math on that hire, by the way, runs the same way the math on a lease should, we walked through it separately in should you hire an administrator.
The advisors already operating lean report the tradeoffs plainly. One told InvestmentNews he saves 1.5 hours a day on commuting and about $12,000 a year in rent working from home. Another downsized from a full traditional office into three suites he rents month to month, using them only when a client meeting actually calls for one. Neither gave up meeting clients face to face. They just stopped paying for the room on the days nobody was using.
In the adviser data we work from, the case for rethinking a lease is stronger than most owners assume. Among 16,486 state-registered, non-ERA RIA firms in our dataset, 10,900, or 66.1%, report a single employee on their Form ADV. A firm of one doesn’t need a reception desk or a conference room built for six. It needs a place to meet a client that isn’t a coffee shop, and that’s a very different, and much cheaper, real estate decision than the one most firms made by default years ago.
A Three-Question Test For Whether You Need A Lease
We call it the three-question test, and it’s meant to take an afternoon.
- Count how many days a month the space actually gets used for a client meeting or genuine team collaboration. Somebody being in town doesn’t count. Most owners have never counted this.
- Price what those same meetings would cost in an executive suite, a shared workspace with private rooms, or a coworking membership billed by the day, and compare that number against the current lease.
- Check the lease terms before doing anything else. Early termination penalties, sublease rights, and renewal notice periods decide whether this is a decision for this quarter or one that has to wait for the next renewal date.
Most firms that run this test land in one of two places, keep the space because the usage actually justifies it, or realize they’ve been paying full-time rent for part-time use.
If You Still Want A Physical Address
Plenty of advisors will run this test and keep the lease, and that’s a legitimate outcome, not a failure to modernize. A physical address does real work for a young firm building credibility, and some client relationships genuinely run better with a consistent place to meet.
What changes is that the decision gets made on purpose instead of by default. Karen kept her suite in the end, on a shorter term and at a lower rate than she’d been paying, because asking the question got her a better deal even when the answer was yes. She also gave back four hundred square feet she’d never used, a conference room built for meetings that had moved to video years ago without her noticing. The firms that lose money on this aren’t the ones with an office. They’re the ones who signed a lease once and never asked again.
Our goal is to make sure a decision this size gets made on purpose, not on autopilot.
Office decisions are one piece of the operating side of a firm. We write about staffing, pricing, and growth more broadly on our practice management page.
Talk through your space decision before you sign a lease:
https://calendly.com/mark-ritzstevens/consultation
Sources: Hartford Funds advisor communication study, via WealthManagement.com. Investment Adviser Association and Comply data, and Gallup hybrid-work data, both via Financial Planning. Individual advisor examples and cost figures via InvestmentNews. Dallas office market figures from JLL research, via CRE Daily. Single-employee share from our own analysis of SEC IAPD Form ADV filings, 10,900 of 16,486 state-registered non-ERA firms reporting a single employee as of the current feed.
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