Commercial Real Estate Leasing – How to Establish a Tenant Lease File and Why Do It

In commercial real estate property management and or leasing, you can develop a comprehensive lease file so that you can track individual tenancy issues and tenancy movements within a property.  That is how you can help your clients as investors and or business owners; that is also how you can find some extra commissions.  Your leasing and property management services can be of the highest quality within a property specialisation and a location.  Clients like that level of specialisation when it comes to solving a property challenge.

Think about it

When you consider the size and complexity of any major office building or retail shopping centre today, the frequency of tenant movement and change is high.  On that basis your tenancy lease file can be a valuable business resource for you as the broker as you strive to improve rental, tenancy occupancy, and income generation.  When you can see what is happening with leases and property occupancy over time and into the future, you will find many different lease fee opportunities and negotiation strategies to work on.

So there are two levels to the analysis of tenancy leases and tenancy movement.  Consider your responses and actions now or as they apply to the following two points:

• Every lease document will be specific and special to the tenant in occupation. There will be certain conditions and terminology is to be enforced and considered.
• Every building will have a number of tenants moving through lease periods, occupancy situations, and lease compliance.

So the issue here is that the tenant and the tenants lease file should be looked at individually for the special circumstances of occupancy, as well as more globally when it comes to the tenant’s position in the tenancy mix and the property.

Set up your lease tracking system

Here are some ideas to merge into your tenancy tracking system or lease file strategy.  You can add to this list based on your property type and property configuration:

1. UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS: Determine a unique name of property identifier to be used within the tenancy and lease assessment.
2. SET POINTS OF REFERENCE: Use the property premises or location plan to establish suites for reference points for each tenant in occupancy and with each separate lease document.
3. DOCUMENTATION: Get copies of all lease documents and retain those copies on file. It is easier to work with copies of documents rather than the originals.
4. STORE ORIGINALS SAFELY: Original leases can be reverted to safe custody or secure storage away from the office.
5. WHAT DOES THE CLIENT WANT?: Understand the client’s priorities when it comes to market rental, occupancy, lease negotiation, and property investment. Those priorities will impact tenancy engagement and negotiation.
6. SEPARATE LEASES: Review every lease document individually. You can extract through the review process the critical dates, processes, and control points for the lease and tenant occupancy.
7. SOFTWARE HELPS: Load the details of tenant occupancy and lease documentation into a suitable software program designed for lease management and tenancy scheduling.
8. RELEVANT LINKS AND DOCUMENTS: All correspondence relating to a tenant in occupancy should be attached to the main tenancy and lease file. Most property management software systems will allow for that storage requirement.
9. DATES: When you consider all the tenants in occupancy, you can apply all the critical dates, rent review activities, issues of lease requirement, expiry dates, and lease options into a diary alert system. With most properties under management or leasing control you should be working at least 12 months in advance when it comes to any critical date activity.
10. SET UP STRATEGIES SEPARATELY: With some tenants, it pays to establish a specific rental strategy or occupancy control. Specific actions and strategies may be required due to the landlord’s investment profile, tenancy movement, property refurbishment, redevelopment, or changes within the existing tenancy mix.  The larger the property, the greater the potential when it comes to overlapping and complex property changes.  Understand your landlord, the tenants, the lease documents, and investment pressures of the property market.  It is a fine equation to balance over time.

Given these points mentioned, you can see how important it is to understand tenants and occupancy and the future potential of the tenancy mix.  That is why you really do need to establish a tenancy lease file and some monitoring system that can apply to the overall tenancy mix strategy.  That is what professional property management and leasing is all about.

In property management and leasing today it is incumbent on each manager or leasing specialist to look at the bigger picture when it comes to lease improvement and tenancy mix change.

You can get more leasing facts in our eCourse right here.