Know How to Crush Your Competition in Commercial Real Estate Leasing

In any town or city there will always be a few real estate competitors covering the leasing activities and intentions of local businesses.  That means you will have a degree of competition when it comes to winning the attention of landlords and finding the best tenants to serve.  Strategy is required if you are to create results in commercial real estate leasing.

Before I go too much further here, I will say that many new people to the industry start off their market activites from a base of property and premises leasing; that is quite a good logic because leasing puts you in front of many landlords and local business owners.  Over time you become the resource to understand what people are doing with their business, their investments and in moving, relocating, expanding and contracting.

So let’s say that the leasing part of the property market is attractive to you.  You can do one or more of the following:

• Use it as a stepping stone to investment sales
• Find property investors in your location
• Help tenants as part of a tenant advocacy service
• Serve landlords with their vacancy issues and property performance
• Work with larger investment portfolios across the specialties of tenant mix, tenant retention, and income growth

All of these things are quite specific and will generate a reasonable amount of interest with your clients and prospects.

Some Real Leasing Strategy

So how can you make your ‘leasing services’ stand out and thereby ‘crush the leasing competition’?  Real strategy is required as there will always be pressures and competitive factors coming at you from:

• Market rents
• Rental Incentives
• Vacancies
• New property projects
• Business sentiment
• Larger competing properties
• Better quality properties
• Technology in Intelligent buildings
• Other agents

When you pitch or present your leasing services, your offerings and ideas should have some solid marketing focus that pulls in the attention of landlords and tenants.  What can you do and say that will attract the best landlords and tenants?  Here are some ideas to help you:

1. Write Editorials and Articles about property leasing – Local business owners and landlords like to hear about rental trends and vacancy rates. Put a story together once a month to publish as an editorial in local papers and place it as an article in your blogs and websites.  You can also integrate the article into your social media channels.
2. Use every leasing signboard as leverage – When you have space to lease in a particular street or location, you have something to talk about when you reach out to local business owners and property investors. Set a target of talking to 100 local people around every property listing.
3. Target high quality buildings and companies – When you target high quality businesses and tenants you will escalate your chances of better commissions. The size of the lease transaction both in area and quality of building will lift the rental rate and that then has a direct flow through to the commission you can charge.  Its a simple rule that is worth remembering.
4. Track upcoming lease vacancies and lease expires – In talking to many local people you will get feedback and tips relating to lease expiry dates and leasing intentions. You can track all of that information in your database.  Regular contact will help you move into lease opportunity at the right time with the best local businesses.

These four simple things will help you greatly with growth of market share in commercial real estate leasing.