The Advantage of Using Stories to Win Commercial Property Managements
When you work with many different property clients in commercial and or retail property management, the information and the strategies that you share about other properties and situations locally can be of great value to winning the listing or closing on a transaction.
Why is that a good idea? Stories give a client comfort when it comes to making a property decision and or moving towards a recommendation. Those stories also engage the clients thinking and attention as you attempt to move on an idea or recommendation. If you have a broad portfolio of managed properties, you should have a variety of stories that you can share without breaching ‘business ethics’ or confidentiality.
Market yourself around local property related stories. Let those messages show the client that you understand their property and challenge, and more importantly you are the top managing agent for the task at hand.
Local Property Messages and Stories
So, what are the messages that you can tell your clients as part of managing and leasing an asset? Think about some of these ideas across your portfolio today. Talk about how you have solved some problems with these issues:
- Rendering leasing strategies – There will always be challenges with tenants in a tenant mix. You will be working with lease re-negotiations, vacancy factors, expansion of occupancy or contraction of some sitting tenants. In a property with many tenants in situ, there will be critical dates to watch for and track. The leasing decisions that you make or recommend should be based on evidence and good investment practice.
- Providing successful tenancy mix solutions – When you consider a tenant mix, some tenants won’t match others in the property, or help the investment performance outcomes. So, with that in mind, it pays to have some strategies for resolving poorly placed tenants, and changing those businesses as tenants that could be under-performing. You can create a property business plan and tenant retention plan to resolve or at the very least, control those things.
- Resolving property performance – When you have ‘turned around’ a poorly performing property that could have been struggling as an investment, it is worth talking about. Use facts and figures to show how your ideas would have taken the struggling property and its outcomes to better levels of income, expenditure, lease stability, and tenant attraction.
- Minimizing vacancy challenges – Filling vacancies will always be an ongoing event in commercial and retail property. I like to track lease vacancies and expiry dates well in advance. When I say ‘in advance’, I am referring to the time frame of 18 months from current time. It is an ongoing window of time where you can focus on lease and or tenant changes. You can prepare the tenant and the landlord for changes based on current market conditions. That is what strategic property management and leasing is all about.
So, there are some good things here to talk to clients about with your property management portfolio. Look for the stories to help you engage in valuable conversation with your clients and customers. Put yourself in the story so that others know that you are the point of difference to take things forward.
