Glossary
Expenses & Charges
Fixed CAM
The portion of the CAM pool that stays the same no matter how full the building is: property taxes, insurance, and any fixed-rate management fee. Fixed CAM sits opposite Variable CAM, and the split matters because only variable costs can legally be grossed up to a stabilized occupancy level.
Firm impact
A landlord who grosses up fixed costs alongside variable ones pads the bill with no lease basis at all. Spotting a fixed-cost line item inside a gross-up calculation is one of the fastest, highest-confidence findings your team can produce.
How this gets abused
At 70% occupancy, a landlord applies a blanket 1.35 gross-up factor to the whole operating expense pool, including a $150,000 property tax bill that has nothing to do with how full the building is. That one move adds $52,500 in phantom tax expense with no support in the lease.
Practitioner note
Ask the landlord for a line-by-line breakdown of what was grossed up. Property taxes, insurance premiums, and debt service should never move with occupancy. If any of them show up inside the grossed-up total, that's an overcharge, not a judgment call.
Related terms
FAQ
Questions about fixed cam
What expenses count as fixed CAM?
Property taxes, insurance premiums, and debt service are the clearest examples. Some leases also treat a flat-rate management fee as fixed, since it doesn't move with how full the building is.
Why does the fixed vs. variable split matter for a gross-up check?
Gross-up exists to normalize costs that genuinely change with occupancy, like janitorial and utilities. Applying the same math to a fixed cost inflates the bill with no basis in occupancy, which is exactly what CAMAudit's gross-up check is built to catch.
You know the term. Now check the math.
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