The Tenant’s Dilemma By Kelly Cunningham

Most business owners wear many hats when it comes to running a business, sales and marketing, operations and quality control, human resources and employee management, finance and business administration. Is it any wonder that business owners are time poor and need to spread their time across these disciplines or outsource functions to professional service advisers?

Similar to finance, accounting and legal services, retail or commercial leasing is a specialist advisory area that involves large sums of money over periods of time that span many years.

Unfortunately, most Tenants approach lease negotiations from a position of limited knowledge of the leasing process and the current market conditions.

A Landlords core activity is to lease their property to Tenants. They typically employ a professional commercial property agent and have access to the most current market data. The Landlord generally prepares the lease and asserts a level of confidence in the leasing process. They are aware that time poor Tenants will often negotiate from an inferior position in relation to market information and representation. A Tenant may be more inclined to place more emphasis on convenience above negotiating the best rental outcome and lease terms. Invariably, this results in the Tenant falling short of achieving all the potential value and terms that may have been potentially available.

We call this the “Tenants Dilemma”.

What can a Tenant do to improve their chances of a great leasing outcome?

Create Confidence and Peace of Mind …. A Safe Pair of Hands …

Any successful decision results from having all the relevant information and the experience to create a great outcome. With experience comes the confidence of having undertaken a transaction many times over. An educated level of professional and market knowledge leads to commencing a transaction with a reasonable understanding of what a potential outcome could be, before it has even commenced. Your Leasing Co. provides their clients with a “Safe Pair of Hands” in what can be a time consuming, technical and very expensive part of running a business. The trust our clients place in the service we provide is returned by us providing confidence and peace of mind in the commercial leasing result achieved.

Experience and market knowledge

Industry knowledge and current market experience is the foundation required to creating an optimal lease negotiation with a Landlord or their agent. Your Leasing Co. have negotiated over 1,000 retail and commercial leases over the past 25 years and bring our technical and industry knowledge to every deal. We have access to market data that is essential to negotiate with Landlords and maximising value for our clients.

Negotiating from a position of confidence

Armed with the same or better market information and experience than the Landlord may have, we are in a powerful position to negotiate the best possible outcome for the Tenant. Negotiation for a large number of people is a confrontational process, which most people tend to try and avoid. A Tenant Representative like Your Leasing Co. undertakes the negotiation process on behalf of their clients and have an informed understanding of what is generally acceptable industry practice in asking for various incentives and the tradeoff in rent payable.

Our clients no longer need to have any more uncomfortable or confrontational conversations with their Landlord that could result in residual negativity. We undertake lease negotiations for them from a commercial perspective and with a background of understanding what is within the bounds of generally acceptable commercial leasing practice. Although, this may be stretched from time to time…

Access to off market deals

Using a Tenant representative like Your Leasing Co. saves time by providing more options to choose from. We are in the market every day and have access to off market deals through our professional property network that Tenants acting for themselves don’t get access to. We develop a document that we call a brief. This is a description of all the tenancy requirements and we discretely circulate this across our professional network. Quite often sites become available for lease, but don’t get advertised because they fit the profile of a Tenants brief and a deal is struck without the property going onto the market.

Simultaneously, we also have our own team of people who actively search the market matching up the criteria from our clients brief.

We take care of the boring documentation Your Leasing Co. provides confidence by ensuring that the deal that was agreed, is what is documented in the lease. Knowing what to look for and fully understanding what was agreed at the negotiation stage saves a lot of time, frustration and uncertainty when it comes to reviewing the lease.

We are nice guys

People like to work with people that they like and share a common goal … We aim to make the whole experience of renewing a lease or finding a new location and negotiating the lease as enjoyable and painless as it possibly can be …. while maximising the value and satisfaction for our clients.

Like More Information? Feel free to send us a copy of your lease and call for a chat.

You can go to www.yourleasingco.com.au or find us on our socials by searching “Your Leasing Co” and like us on Face Book and Linked In. Or you can just Call us on 1300 356 702

We look forward to hearing from you.