As The Furniture X-Change heads to IFMA's World Workplace 2026 in Anaheim, we look at what's keeping facilities leaders up at night.
Every November, corporate real estate and facilities professionals do the same thing: they stop looking at this year's budget and start bracing for the next one.
This year, we're doing it from the exhibit floor. The Furniture X-Change will be at World Workplace 2026 in Anaheim (November 18–20), and before we pack the booth, we wanted to know what's on FMs' minds. So, we reviewed the education program and trade press. The picture is consistent, and it isn't comfortable.
What the Program Tells Us
IFMA has organized this year's education into thematic tracks, and the names say a lot: Resilient Facilities, Leading Change, Facility Operations, Future Workplaces, and Connected Buildings.
The program describes Resilient Facilities as strategies for managing risk and building the operational resilience organizations need to "adapt and endure." That is the language of a profession expecting turbulence, not calm.
The Costs That Don't Answer to You
The trade press agrees, and the common thread is cost pressure that facilities teams can't negotiate away.
Energy comes first. A Johnson Controls survey of facility managers found that rising energy costs are the number one challenge affecting FMs' ability to manage their facilities effectively. The drivers sit outside any building's walls. Multi-site portfolio managers are contending with extreme weather, regional grid constraints, rising electricity demand from data centers, and fuel supply uncertainty. In January, Winter Storm Fern briefly pushed Henry Hub gas prices above $30/MMBtu, and electricity prices spiked across major grids. In PJM territory, one energy brokerage estimates commercial customers could see electric bills rise 20–30%.
Insurance, labor, and materials follow. Facilities Dive's 2026 predictions note that as budgets tighten and labor, material, and insurance costs rise, operators will be pushed to do more with leaner teams and faster timelines. Its summary of the trend is blunt: preserve and upgrade what we already have.
Tariffs add more. Office furniture manufacturers have been dealing with them directly. Humanscale's CEO told Dezeen that tariffs have been changing every few weeks, and HBF has described a 3.5% tariff-related surcharge on purchases. For anyone planning a refit or relocation, new furniture pricing has become a moving target.
None of this is a failure of facilities management. These are market forces, and no amount of operational excellence changes the rate your utility files next spring.
So, Control What You Can
If energy, insurance, and tariffs are outside your control, it becomes even more important to tightly manage the parts of your budget that are within it. Furniture is one of the biggest, yet often one of the least managed.
Consider what a multi-lease portfolio looks like in practice. Leases expire on different schedules. Some floors are shrinking for hybrid work, while others are being refit. Restoration clauses, holdover penalties, and landlord deadlines apply whether or not the furniture has been dealt with.
The back end of a lease is where the "gotchas" tend to live, and furniture sitting in a space you're contractually obligated to hand back empty is a gotcha with a daily rate attached.
It's also an area where you can recover value. Instead of defaulting to new furniture at tariff-inflated prices, you can evaluate what you already own and what could be remanufactured, reassigned, or reallocated to fit the next space.
That's the case for working with an experienced decommissioning and liquidation partner, and the case gets stronger as the number of leases grows.
Done well, it means:
Predictable exits. Vacating on time, on budget, and in accordance with lease terms, without exposure to penalties. As one Facilities Director told us, "My job is on the line if we don't vacate spaces on time."
Reduced exposure to new furniture pricing. Remanufacturing and reassigning existing assets while maintaining corporate furniture standards keeps you out of the tariff and supply chain queue.
Consistency across the portfolio. One partner, one process, and one set of reporting, rather than a different local vendor for every lease.
Documented sustainability outcomes. Landfill diversion and donation values reported clearly enough to share with your ESG stakeholders.
We've seen this work firsthand. For a global bank, we decommissioned a facility as its lease was vacated, then remanufactured and reallocated assets for a new hybrid workspace, completing installation on time for occupancy.
For a global financial services firm, a 65,000-square-foot liquidation delivered an on-time, on-budget vacate, along with CSR metrics that exceeded its ESG stakeholders' initial requirements.
Come Find Us in Anaheim
The FMs we expect to meet in November aren't naive about 2027. They know the energy market will do what it does. What they want is to enter next year with fewer unknowns. Every line item you can make predictable is one less competing with those you can't control.
If you're managing furniture assets across multiple leases, come talk to us at World Workplace. Bring your lease calendar and your toughest vacate date. We'll bring a plan.
Visit The Furniture X-Change at Booth #628, IFMA World Workplace 2026, Anaheim, November 18–20.