The Secrets to Successfully Finding Larger Listings in Commercial Property
In commercial real estate brokerage, the larger properties that exist in your town or city are likely to be a good source of new business leads, listings, and commission opportunities. There are a few reasons for that trend.
Consider these facts:
- In the larger properties you usually have the better tenants and or businesses in occupation
- Larger properties create churn and change at a greater frequency and scale both in leasing and sales
- The owners of these properties tend to be corporations, investment trusts, or high net worth individuals
So you can find some good new business in commercial real estate sales, leasing or property management if you focus on the top quality properties, the larger properties, and those in good locations.
Plan for Finding Real Estate Listings
Here is a matrix approach to monitoring and tracking the property activity in these larger buildings:
- Tenant Mix and Profiles – Check out and visit all the larger buildings in your location; do so in ways that logically control your canvassing of the streets and zones. You don’t want to overlook any property with potential. Visit the properties and take digital photographs of the directory boards in each case for later reference and in making tenant contact calls. As you contact all those tenants you can inquire as to their property intentions, lease termination dates, and requirements to expand or move location.
- Decision makers, movers and shakers – Some people locally will be highly active or dominant in commercial property activity. Make a list of the top players in the market and move them into a special VIP segment of your database. Keep in regular contact with all of them in moving ahead as you prospect for new business.
- Market rents – What are the rents doing locally and how do they compare to the rents achieved in high-quality large buildings? Over time the movement in market rents will be of real use in reaching out to all your client and business owner contacts. Be prepared to talk about rental movement in your tenant and landlord contact endeavours.
- Vacancy factors in the market and in particular buildings – A property with higher vacancy levels will have issues and problems that you can help with. Always compare building vacancy factors to those in the general property market.
- Major tenants – Some tenants will occupy very large areas of space in local investment properties. Directly approach those tenants to see what property requirements they may have over the coming few years. Some businesses have a real focus on services, amenities, improvements, environmental matters, and occupancy costs. Understand the ‘leverage factors’ that drive property decisions for these larger businesses and companies.
- Renovation and refurbishment – What will happen when it comes to upgrading all of the top quality properties in your city? Some property owners will move tenants, some tenants will relocate of their own choice, and other newer properties will attract movement and growth of tenant occupancy. Look for the signs of renovation and refurbishment.
So there are some good things that you can do here with the larger properties locally. You can drill down into the property facts and information. You can extract listing and transactions both personally and for your brokerage.