Conditioning Your Landlord Clients in Commercial Real Estate Leasing

As a commercial real estate agent specialising in leasing and property management, you should talk frankly and directly with landlords about the prevailing market conditions. Be honest and confident when it comes to providing recommendations and strategies relating to solving vacancy issues, improving market rentals, and changing the tenancy mix.

It should be said that the leasing process and the professional services provided in leasing are quite specialised and important from an investment point of view. You may choose to specialise in large properties in prime locations. In that way you will negotiate leases of high value and therefore have the potential to earn substantial commissions from each transaction.

So the message here is to identify high quality buildings in your town or city and then to focus on the property owners in each case so that you can help them with future leasing needs and opportunities.

As the local agent you can definitely add considerable value to the property in so many different ways when you find the right tenant and create the appropriate lease. Factors such as rental, lease terms and conditions, rent reviews, option periods, renovation and relocation provisions, and market rental all have relevance to the lease negotiation as you work on behalf of the client.

Here are some ideas to help you with your landlord communications, presentations, and leasing strategies.

• Specialise marketing processes – With every leasing appointment take the time to design a marketing campaign that directly relates to the vacancy challenge and the target market. Bring together a number of strategies across direct marketing, database coverage, newspaper advertising, and online promotion. In each case you can design advertising specifically for the vacancy in question. Use keywords that are carefully selected for the ideal tenant profile and the property. As part of your presentation to the client, you can and should provide two or three alternative marketing approaches so the client has some budgetary choices. In each case you should make your recommendations in each marketing package, and show the client the cost components that apply to the most effective marketing methods to suit the circumstances and the property.
• Incentive strategies – Most tenants today will expect or ask for incentives as part of the lease negotiation with the landlord. It is therefore appropriate to consider the best types of incentive that will suit the deal, the landlord, and the property. Incentives will change in value and in type, subject to the factors of supply and demand, together with local vacancy factors. In monitoring the local property market you can understand what incentives will best suit the property and the vacancy. Make your recommendations accordingly.
• Exclusive agency – As part of the leasing presentation, make sure that you are making your recommendations and pitching your services on the basis of exclusivity. When you control the listing as part of an exclusive agency, you can really get to work on finding tenants and promoting the vacancy to the target market. To convert more exclusive agencies over time, practice your pitch and presentation.
• Tenant enquiry – Throughout the year you will find that the levels of tenant enquiry will change for different property types. You can and should track the levels of enquiry applying to the property type across all of your exclusive listings. As part of the listing pitch to the landlord, show them exactly how enquiry rates a changing and what tenants are looking for.
• Market rentals – Track and measure the differences and movements in market rentals as they apply to different locations and different property types. Show the client exactly how their vacancy will compare on a market rental basis to other competing properties.

So there are plenty of things that you can do here in providing a specialist commercial real estate leasing service. Do everything that you can to improve your marketing services and local area knowledge when it comes to property industry; watch the variations in the levels of tenant enquiry, and the recent transactions successfully completed.