Editor’s Note:  Centralization, automation, and offshoring are the big levers to improve operating efficiency and NOI. While much has been written about best practices in centralization and automation, there are few great examples of real estate offshoring done right. So I asked Ben Siscovick, President of real estate owner-operator Spaxel, to write about his experience. Ben spent over a dozen years as a technology operator and investor; he was a founding member and General Partner at IA Ventures, a top decile early stage venture capital firm, and an Equity Research Analyst at Millennium, one of the world's largest hedge funds, where he covered the tech sector. Ben is also co-founder of Odyssey Staffing, a firm providing offshore talent solutions for real estate firms. –BH

Human capital is one of the most critical components of every real estate organization—and inevitably, one of the most expensive. For small and medium-sized operators, scaling a workforce has become increasingly difficult as rising capital, operating, and construction costs continue to squeeze margins.

This is no abstract problem—it's the exact challenge we faced when my partners and I launched our own real estate platform, Spaxel, seven years ago. 

From the onset, we intended to build a different type of platform. My years in the technology sector had made me accustomed to businesses that scaled efficiently. My partner, Granit Gjonbalaj, had spent the prior half dozen years as Chief Development Officer at WeWork. We knew how to build out teams. Yet, even with that experience, we hit a wall—the traditional math didn’t work. We realized there was no way to operate competitively at institutional scale without massive investment in labor, while our larger competitors enjoyed significant resource advantages that we simply couldn’t match. 

Financial constraints forced us to radically rethink how we would allocate resources and build our team. We ended up looking outside the real estate industry, borrowing a solution long utilized in manufacturing and technology: offshoring.

While traditionally viewed as a tool for industrial production and call centers, modern offshoring is now used to handle an expanding array of complex administrative, operational, and technical work. We found that many areas of real estate lend themselves naturally to this model, reflecting a broader industry shift toward centralization, standardization, and digitization. 

Done well, offshoring can significantly widen real estate margins, unlock latent efficiencies, build operational resilience, and create critical capacity to invest in growth. Done poorly, it can introduce new risks and operational friction.

In this letter we’ll explore:

• Which real estate functions are best suited for offshore integration
• The operational and cultural requirements for implementing offshoring effectively
• A turnkey approach to the challenges of recruitment, compliance, training, and cultural integration
• The pitfalls operators encounter when offshoring is implemented without the right processes, safeguards, and cultural alignment

Offshoring Versus Outsourcing

It's important to distinguish between offshoring and outsourcing—terms often used interchangeably even though they represent very different strategies.

Outsourcing is transactional. It involves hiring an external third party vendor to deliver a specific output, with the vendor controlling the people, process, and quality.

Offshoring is structural. It refers to a company hiring workers, often through a foreign subsidiary or partner, who happen to sit in another country, typically where labor costs are lower or specialized skills are more readily available. With offshoring, the hiring company retains management and process control within its own organizational structure. The work is performed abroad, but the personnel operate as extensions of the domestic team. Offshoring allows domestic firms to capture cost arbitrage while maintaining strict control over quality and culture.

Why Offshoring Matters

The case for offshoring starts with a simple equation: labor-dollar productivity. In other words, offshoring matters because it changes the real estate math. 

When a real estate firm can slash 50 percent or more from workforce costs, the impact can be transformational. Those reductions directly translate into margin expansion that give firms room to invest in new growth opportunities or otherwise materially improve profitability. 

Beyond the immediate impact on margin expansion, offshoring solves a deeper problem: talent scarcity. By widening the hiring aperture to include global labor markets in places like Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, offshoring offers deep pools of skilled workers who can step into technical, financial, and operational roles that can be challenging to hire domestically.

Offshoring also strengthens the stability and resiliency of the organization itself: the cost savings of offshoring provide critical resource capacity to add staff redundancy while reducing dependency on one-off roles and single points of failure. And finally, distributed teams give operators the benefit of “follow-the-sun” time zone advantage, critical in customer support, maintenance coordination, and data processing. 

Offshoring, of course, has been part of the global business toolkit since the post–World War II era, though its purpose and impact have changed dramatically over time. What began as a way to relocate factory work has evolved into a strategy for building distributed, highly skilled teams that can support core operations. 

The modern offshoring era, beginning in the 2000s and accelerating after the COVID-19 pandemic, represented an even more consequential shift. With digital collaboration tools, cloud infrastructure, and shared workflow systems, the physical office was no longer the organizing principle of work. Companies now had direct access to global talent pools, and geography mattered far less than process clarity and communication. 

Real estate firms are now beginning to recognize the myriad benefits of offshoring, not just as a staffing tactic, but as a way to fundamentally change how their businesses operate.

Real Estate Offshoring

At our own firm, Spaxel—an owner, operator, and developer of institutional real estate assets—all offshoring is guided by a core operating principle: 

Anything that does not need to be done physically on-site by expensive U.S. labor can be centralized and offshored.

Applied consistently, this principle reshapes how a real estate organization like ours allocates talent and where work is performed. The logic applies across nearly every major function in the business.  

In practice, operationalizing this approach requires a clear distinction between work that must happen physically on-site and work that is knowledge-based and digitally executable. Once that line is drawn, offshoring becomes a practical operating model rather than an abstract staffing idea.

Property Management
The distinction in property management is between the physical and the administrative. The physical management of an asset—work that requires a person to be on-site—must remain domestic. This includes unit turns and renovations, capital improvement projects, building maintenance, lease touring, tenant relations, and municipal engagement.

At the same time, a large portion of modern property management consists of desk work that can be successfully transitioned to an integrated offshore “virtual property management” (VPM) team. These groups manage the knowledge work that supports on-site operations and act as full extensions of the domestic team.

VPM responsibilities include processing rental applications, executing digital lease agreements, and coordinating leasing follow-up. VPM teams manage collections by tracking receivables, issuing late payment notices, and monitoring payment plans. They also coordinate maintenance by dispatching work orders, managing vendors, and following up on completion.

In addition, VPM teams handle procurement, budgeting, accounting, and compliance coordination. They prepare and track property financial plans, manage accounts payable and receivable, reconcile accounts, and ensure adherence to regulatory requirements.  

By shifting more of the administrative workload offshore, the on-site management team is freed to focus on closing prospects, managing resident relationships, and maintaining and improving the physical asset itself. The result is not just lower cost, but clearer role definition—and significantly better operational focus.

General and Sub-Contracting
Construction is inherently local, but construction administration is not. Site supervision, safety, and trade coordination need to happen in person. Nearly everything else can be standardized and handled remotely.

Pre-construction planning, estimating, procurement, scheduling, document control, and project coordination are all desk-based activities. Offshoring these functions allows the domestic site superintendent to focus on what actually requires their presence: physical construction, quality control, and field safety. Offshore teams support that work by handling material takeoffs, bid leveling, purchase orders, schedule management, critical path tracking, daily logs, and documentation.

Highly technical work like BIM modeling and architectural shop drawings can also be handled offshore, where deep technical talent is often more readily and cost-effectively available. The result is a construction operation where the most expensive domestic labor is focused on the field, not buried in spreadsheets and submittals.

Corporate Support Functions
Across all business lines, centralized offshore teams can absorb much of the back-office burden. High-volume, repeatable administrative tasks—particularly those critical to compliance, financial management, and data integrity—are particularly well suited to centralization.

Offshore teams manage the complete financial reporting cycle, including monthly and quarterly bookkeeping and all accounts payable and receivable processing. They support HR functions such as payroll administration, recruiting, onboarding and offboarding, and employee file maintenance. They also execute contract administration, coordinate insurance and risk management documentation, and manage compliance reporting and audit preparation. General administrative support, including calendar management, travel booking, expense processing, and document preparation, can also be brought offshore.

The pattern is clear: this structure improves consistency and data integrity while significantly reducing cost.

The Impact of AI
A common question we have been hearing more of lately: Will artificial intelligence render offshoring obsolete?  The short answer is no—AI and offshoring go hand in hand. Although AI may be slowing the rate of new hiring, it certainly has not yet led to mass layoffs. In fact, AI has meaningfully increased what each team member can output.

When offshore labor is paired with AI tools, productivity gains compound. Offshore teams become AI-enabled teams, delivering faster turnaround, higher consistency, and better output at a fraction of the domestic cost. Rather than replacing labor, AI amplifies it, making offshoring an even more powerful operating lever.

Hiring Offshore: Implementation and Challenges
Here’s a reality check: Implementing an offshore strategy is not as simple as posting a LinkedIn job ad in another country. Organizations often underestimate the infrastructure and effort required.  Recruiting and onboarding talent in unfamiliar markets, administering payroll and benefits in compliance with local labor laws, establishing robust data security systems, and creating an office environment and culture where staff want to be while working late into the night (as they often work U.S. hours), all introduce real-world complexity.

Beyond these technical challenges, favorable outcomes demand creating the right culture—both domestically and internationally. U.S. teams must view their offshore counterparts as extensions of the organization, not replacements. Offshore teams must feel fully integrated and supported. And technology needs to provide the connective tissue. Google Apps, Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox aren’t conveniences, they’re core infrastructure of the firm. In this model, Zoom becomes the new conference room.

Executing the Strategy
For many firms, this is where offshoring breaks down. The operational, legal, and cultural hurdles are real, and they often derail efforts before the model has a chance to work. Failure in this realm can have detrimental impact felt across the company. 

That is where specialized partners come in.

We built our own offshore infrastructure internally over more than a decade to solve our specific scaling challenges. That platform eventually became Odyssey Staffing. Originally designed to address our needs across our own property management, general- and sub-contracting businesses, the infrastructure was recently opened to third-party real estate clients. It allows real estate operators to access a turnkey solution that handles recruiting, training, payroll, IT, compliance, and cultural integration, effectively bypassing (or at least significantly reducing) the trial-and-error that typically comes with building an offshore presence from scratch. 

In today’s ultra-competitive real estate markets, improving labor-dollar productivity is a competitive requirement. But offshoring is so much more than simply cost arbitrage. It is an operating strategy for building out robust organizations despite rising costs and constrained resources. It’s a playbook for success. 

By decoupling work from location and rigorously integrating global talent, real estate operators can expand their margins, build competitive and resilient teams, and focus their domestic energy on driving core strategic value to the enterprise. They gain capacity, resilience, and focus. And in this market, those advantages compound quickly.