When you as a tenant call or email commercial real estate listings, who does the person on the other end work for? Business owners and managers are savvy folks; probably sharper than most. After all, they run businesses. While that may look easy to the casual observer; trust me, there’s tons of subtlety in the decision making that goes into a company’s clock keeping proper time. Nowadays if you want to buy anything you start online. Hell, you can buy a freaking Sherman Tank on el internet!

Ah, so why is it so damn hard to find a halfway-decent retail, office, or industrial space for rent on the global information superhighway? Let’s start by reconstructing the process of searching through commercial real estate listings.

Step 1 — Search Googlez for Commercial Real Estate Listings

For this example I just searched for “warehouse space for rent”. Here’s what I got on the first page:

warehouse space for rent — Commercial Real Estate Listings

In a nutshell, you have a bunch of listings that are storage places, not warehouse space where you can run a business out of. No good there. You also get pages with a bunch of listings on it from City Feet, Loopnet, Craigslist, and if you’re lucky, Digsy (hey, nice plug). There will be some other irrelevant junk in there too, but that’s the gist of Googling it.

Step 2 — Wade through mountains of commercial real estate listings and inquire on tons of properties

Great, the fun begins here. You could go on that Craigslist adventure. You might find a great warehouse or office space there. You also might wake up with abdominal stitches in a motel room bathtub filled of ice, with lipstick on the mirror that reads “CALL 911 NOW!” (min 1:18). You also have Loopnet and City Feet, which are owned by the same company (CoStar) and have several hundred dollar paid subscriptions. So there’s that.

Bottom line is you comb through listings, you find some spots that might work, you leave voicemails and emails and wait for the guy or gal associated with each of the commercial real estate listings to call/email you back.

Step 3 — Almost nobody calls/emails you back and it’s flipping annoying

What the heck, man? I thought these people wanted to lease their office or store or industrial space. Why would they not get back in touch? What’s the point of posting commercial real estate listings if their non-response is nothing but crickets? Rest assured; it’s not you, it’s them. Our research indicates that 80% to 90% of CRE spaces for rent inquiries never get replies from listing agents.

Here’s why and the answer to today’s quiz question, “Who do you think you’re talking to?”: the people you have been contacting are listing agents, and listing agents:

  • Represent the landlord’s interests
  • Don’t get paid a salary or hourly wage
  • Don’t make any money unless they rent the space they represent
  • Therefore, must pick and choose only the most lucrative and easiest deals for them
  • Therefore, exclusively deal with the biggest businesses directly
  • Therefore, prefer to deal with Tenant Rep Agents who’ve screened/qualified the client

Step 4 — A few listing agents do get back in touch

What a relief, like 10% of listing agents do get back you. Swell. These listing agents may be representing one of your top choices, or they could be representing one of the spaces that you liked the least. The space that you may or may not like, may or may not be available.

What’s that, listing agent? The space that I do like is no longer available? Shocker. But wait, you know of (and are the listing agent for) other commercial real estate listings that have less space, cost more, and is in a less desirable locations? How wonderful!

Step 5 (recommended) — Git-cher-self a dang Tenant Rep Agent for goodness sakes

That’s right—you need a CRE pro that works for you and saves you all of this struggle. Better yet, get yourself a Digsy CRE expert (shameless plug)! Now you’re cooking with fire.

I’ll go into detail on the mechanics of what a Digsy Expert is is and what she/he does in this post, but here’s the executive summary.

Tenant Agents:

  • Represent the tenant/buyer’s interests
  • Don’t get paid a salary or hourly wage
  • Make money when they find their client a space among all available properties

The key difference between listing agents and tenant agents is that the latter work for you and have no conflict of interest in terms of which properties you rent. I’ll be posting a blog detailing 9 tips for getting a top CRE agents for free so keep an eye out for that.

PROTIP: Our Digsy experts always help tenants to get those ducks in a row, advocate for you and your business to landlords, and do all of the heavy lifting; calling, scheduling tours, negotiating, et al.