Moving an office can feel like a tremendous task for most companies.  After all, you still have a business to run, and if you’re reading this, you’re most likely not a Fortune 500 company that can outsource all of the planning and execution that goes into it; you’re most likely attempting to do it all yourself.  So how do you run a business while moving somewhat painlessly -  change the oil while driving car, per se?

The Tenant Rep & Some Valuable Tips:

You need to give yourself as much time as possible, 6-12 months ideally. The less time you have the more likely you’ll be forced into something you don’t want, due to less time to search for vacant properties and less time to negotiate the deal. And let’s talk about negotiating that deal.  Your Best Advice: Tenant Representative. You’ve most likely used a residential real estate agent to purchase and home, it is doubly or more important to secure a tenant rep for your commercial space. Here’s how a tenant rep benefits you directly:

• We are free (we are paid a commission by the landlord for bring rental income to their building)
• We have access to commercial MLS (multiple listing) systems, not just Loopnet, that provide real time information on vacant properties which helps you narrow your search based on pre-defined criteria like:

1. Access to interstate(s)
2. Power & Data Cabling
3. Office Layout
4. Class A vs B vs C (think quality)
5. 1st Floor vs any floor
6. Demographics
7. Quality of Tenants
8. Recent Transactions within Bldg
9. Brokers, Management, Owners
10. Is the Bldg for Sale?
11. How is the property leveraged?  Over-Leveraged?
12. Price Reductions
13. Tenant Allowances
14. Free Rent

Through experience, we are master negotiators, protecting your interest over the landlord’s and negotiating lease terms to benefit your company, now and for the future.

Once a lease is presented, we will walk your controlling members through it, in detail, to assist with items that may need to be changed.  This is where lease transaction experience counts and where lesser agents defer to attorney “legalese” as their reasoning to withdraw themselves from further negotiations.  So, once the “draft lease” arrives, these agents disappear.

A Few Tips When Considering Leasing Space :

• When you walk through your final choice of office to develop the “build-out and refresh” scope of work for the landlord, make sure to so in full lighting. While this did not really affect the build-out that we needed done, it did significantly impact what we asked for in terms of bringing the unit back to an acceptable move-in condition (refresh).
• If you need any build-out work done, make sure that you have you, your tenant rep, the landlord and the architect (usually hired by the landlord) in the room and go over precisely what your recommendations are and arrive at a consensus on the final total square footage. In most offices this might be pretty straight forward, but because some offices have unique designs based on floor plate, many of the of the interior walls may have unusual angles, which makes calculating square footage accurately a challenge.
• Be extremely detailed in your scope of work for both the buildout and refresh. Insist on meeting with the property or construction manager personally to go through each item so that there is no confusion.
• Check the functionality of everything