Selecting space for your organization and successfully negotiating a lease are complex, time-consuming tasks, full of potential pitfalls. The pitfalls only multiply if you undertake the process on your own without the benefit of an experienced commercial real estate professional serving as your tenant representative.
Engaging a tenant representative who acts exclusively on your behalf can eliminate many of the hassles and missed opportunities in site selection and negotiation. It can prevent potentially disastrous missteps and it can cut much of your real estate expense. More importantly, aligning yourself with an experienced tenant rep can turn up real economic opportunities and help turn your space into a strategic asset.
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Very few commercial real estate professionals exclusively represent tenants. Such exclusive tenant reps never work on behalf of owners and developers. Most real estate professionals divide their practice between both tenant and landlord representation which can create obvious conflicts of interest.
Tenant reps have made a name for themselves during the past two decades since real estate agency laws required real estate brokers to disclose that they are working on behalf of the landlord and not the tenant. Your goal in working with a tenant rep is to obtain true economic savings and secure space on terms that best serve your needs over the life of your lease. While working on your behalf, a good tenant representative should generate savings and benefits that far exceed the cost of his or her professional compensation.
That compensation is almost always covered by the Landlord in what amounts to a similar situation in residential real estate transactions where the seller, or in this case, Landlord pays the fee. What most Tenants do not realize is that if a Tenant is not represented by his or her own advocate, then Landlord or Landlord’s representative benefit from an increased fee while the Tenant’s interests are left essentially unrepresented.
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H.B. "Buck" Forcum