How to Establish a Clear Market Position in Commercial Property Management

Commercial property management is quite different when compared to leasing and sales although the clients are similar.  In property management you are working with the client for the long haul.  Issues and strategies can take months if not years to bring to finality.

The property management division of your business can serve a client for years and on that basis boost income opportunities and repeat brokerage business.  In saying, that it is wise you choose the right clients in the process.

What’s typical?

Typically a property manager will be working on high value strategies that are difficult to define and implement.  For example:

  • Finding the best tenants to fill a vacancy for the long term
  • Resolving weaknesses in lease documentation
  • Removing and replacing poor quality tenants
  • Boosting the market rent
  • Improving tenant mix structures
  • Aligning the budget of a property to the cash flow needs of the landlord
  • Maintaining a property that could have age and improvement issues

All of these things take time to address and resolve.  When you think about things like this, you can see why a definite property plan and business strategy is required for each asset.  A distressed property will usually have a combination of problems to address.

To be a top commercial property manager you really do need to stand out from the others in the property market and particularly your competitors.  You will require some special points of difference to do that.  The local property investors must see you as important to the investment targets that they are achieving.  How can you do that?

Upgrade your services

The best way to achieve prominence as a property manager is to market your skills and services in a special way.  There is absolutely no requirement to be ‘ordinary’ in commercial property management.

Here are some special ideas that will help your services stand out as real and relevant to the landlords that you serve:

  1. Offer a property review service to local property investors – Many investors that self-manage actually lack real market information and comparable property details when it comes to tenant mix structure and rental recoveries. Provide a simple tenant mix review process to self-managing property investors.
  2. Negotiate market rental reviews – Some investors do not have the rental coverage or negotiation skills to work through the market rent reviews for a tenant and lease situation. For a fee you can specialise those services with selected landlords.
  3. Upgrades of lease documentation – Many leases are today poorly drafted for the landlord’s investment plans. A lease is not just a simple document reflecting the occupancy facts for a single tenant in a property.  A lease should be drafted to the investment standards of the landlord before it gets to the tenant for signature.  Understand the critical lease terms and conditions that can help your landlords negotiate the best outcomes for their property investments.  It is common practice for standard leases to be constructed for use in particular properties.

So the message here is simple. You can do some very specific things for local property owners that will help you get closer to their property management situations.  Develop a level of trust so that you can position your brokerage for the property management requirements of the client when they are to happen.

You can get more commercial property management tips in our eCourse ‘Snapshot’ right here.

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