How to be a Top Leasing Advisor in Commercial Real Estate Agency
In commercial real estate it is essential that your market share as an agent be growing and strengthening at every opportunity. There are different ways to do that. Perhaps the easiest way is for you to regard yourself as and ‘advisor’ and property specialist. You can then ‘sell’ yourself and your experience in a particular way.
The clients that we serve need specialised help in many different ways. Try some of these for an example:
- Finding more tenants to fill current vacancies in an existing investment property
- Changing the tenant mix to suit property performance needs
- Increasing the income potential for a property by improving lease structures
- Providing a tenant retention plan to help a property move ahead in growth
- Negotiating large and difficult leases with anchor tenants
- Giving the landlord some alternatives in the tenant mix and lease structures
- Recovering outgoings from the lease structures
So the list goes on and perhaps you can add more to it. The fact of the matter is that a leasing specialist can bring a lot of strategy and speciality to the clients that they serve. Market yourself as an ‘advisor’ to help your clients with the various challenges of property occupancy.
Here are my tips to help you with the ‘leasing’ part of the property market and what you can do to improve your commissions and listings:
- Get to know all of the local businesses in your area. That may be several hundred or perhaps more businesses. Understand who the decision maker is in each business and just what their leasing intentions may be. Find out when their lease expires and what the chances are of expansion or contraction at the next date of lease option or renewal.
- From the previous point, establish ongoing contact with those businesses so they remember you at the right time of property or leasing need. You can keep that contact going with market information, meetings, and telephone calls. Getting in front of the decision maker will be really important to the process.
- Get to know all of the franchise groups that are active (or could be active) in your local area. From time to time they will be looking to expand or change their property needs or leases. They will have a particular property profile and lease standard, so you should get that information as early as possible as you build the relationships with these groups. That information will help you in finding the right property and lease at the right time.
- Understand just what the vacancy trends in your town or city are doing, the market rents, the incentives, and the lease standards. Monitor the competing and vacant properties to see where tenants are moving to or from. Market knowledge is the key to the process.
From all of this preparation work you become a true ‘advisor’ to the process of property performance and tenant mix improvement. Your value to the client as an industry specialist is high.