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How to Review Lease Details in Selling a Commercial Property

As the opportunity for listing commercial investment property arises, we can sometimes be too eager to take the listing without getting all the important facts that affect the price or rental situation. Leases really do matter with the income stream of the property.

Check the leases on a commercial investment property before you talk about the property’s price, as the leases may assist or hinder the sale. They can also dictate a sales strategy. 

This means that a good commercial real estate broker or agent must know the structure of a lease and what makes a good lease.

Property Lifecycle

Depending on the age of a property, the next phase of its lifecycle may be refurbishment, demolition, or remix of tenancies. Every phase is different. The demographics of the region where the property is located will also have something to do with the future of the property.

Know About the Leases and the Dates

A property with a majority of leases that will soon expire may be attractive to a purchaser who wants to ‘owner occupy’ the property or a developer who wants to change the site and create a new building.

On the other hand, the same property will not be attractive to a new investor unless they want to undertake refurbishment works and re-position the property with new tenants.  Vacancies cost money. Know the differences in the property occupancy formula and the target market that will suit the asset.

Decisions in property today are based on strategy needs and timing; as an agent or broker for a commercial property, you need to be the ultimate strategist.

vacant office premises

Clarity is Important

That’s how you can win more new business. That’s how you get a competitive edge in your real estate business. Talk about strategy and solutions. Show the client the confidence you have in your ideas and promotional processes.

When looking at the potential sale of the property, the lease aspects requiring future awareness and understanding in the sale include:

  • Rent review profiles – are they solid and well-timed or just gear to the consumer price index? Also, look for the market rent reviews and see if they are well-timed.
  • The lease expires – these are always a concern if the property requires stable cash flow, so look for multiple lease expiries that are close to each other and that may consist of a majority of the lettable space in the building.
  • Option periods – from a landlord perspective, lease options are not always a good thing to have as they can frustrate the future of the property; it really depends on what the landlord thinks that they want to do with the property. It is of note that many large shopping centres and malls do not allow lease options for that very reason.
  • Details of any current incentives with existing tenants – some lease incentives impact the property for months or even years. When the property is to be sold, these incentives must be offset or discharged at settlement as the future purchaser may not want to take over the burden of such.
  • Outgoings recoveries – It pays to check the leases to see exactly what those recoverable items may be, as it can impact the property sale or buyer interest. Knowing the differences in leases, particularly net leases, will allow the landlord to get back some of the building operating costs. 
  • History of income and expenditure performance – I always go back at least 3 years to check these numbers and to see what have been the major changes in the outgoings. What you are looking for is overly large imbalances in outgoings from year to year that indicate that something major has impacted the property or a strategy has changed. Get reasons for any changes of this type so that any astute buyer can be given logical explanations.
  • The current budget of income and expenditure performance – every commercial investment building of any type should function to a budget each year and the details should be available for your review. Parts of the expenditure that impact greatly on the property are the rates and taxes as they take up an average a full 33% of the building expenditure (perhaps more). You need to know that these rates and taxes are on average with other properties in the region. If that is not the case, then investigate the situation and have your answers ready, because questions will arise in property buyer inspections.

Property performance elements such as these will affect the potential income from the property well into the future and will also dictate the best time to sell the property.

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Sale Timing

In an ideal world, you would time the sale so that the income is optimised and the outgoings are controlled to acceptable levels. This cannot always be done, especially in markets like those we have today, but you should know where you stand on the property performance before you proceed with a sales programme. 

Strengths and weaknesses of cash flow should be identified, and logical reasons should be provided before any sale campaign starts.

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