The requirements brief is only as good as the conversation that created it. Many tenant representation advisers treat the intake interview as a quick call to confirm square footage and a target move-in date, then spend weeks correcting misaligned shortlists and re-explaining why a building on the initial tour was never appropriate. A disciplined intake methodology changes that dynamic completely — it surfaces the real constraints, the unstated priorities, and the political realities that determine whether a site selection process ends in a signed lease or a prolonged stall.
Why the Intake Interview Is the Highest-Leverage Moment in Tenant Representation
The intake interview sets the information baseline for every decision that follows. A floor plate assumption made in the first conversation shapes the shortlist, the financial model, and the negotiation strategy. Getting it wrong early means compounding errors across months of work.
Most advisers underestimate how much a well-structured intake can distinguish them commercially. When a client sees that their adviser has asked about headcount growth scenarios, lease accounting treatment, and sublease exposure before the first tour, they understand they are working with someone who thinks at the level of business outcomes, not just square footage.
The interview is also a trust-building instrument. Clients reveal information proportional to the confidence they have in the person asking. An adviser who arrives with a prepared framework, asks layered follow-up questions, and demonstrates that they understand capital allocation decisions will hear things that an adviser who wings the call will never learn.
Understanding How Tenant Rep Advisers Should Run the Intake Interview Behind a Requirements Brief means treating that first conversation as a structured diagnostic, not a friendly chat. The discipline of a methodology protects both sides — the client gets a brief that actually reflects their business, and the adviser builds a file they can defend to any stakeholder.
Preparing the Interview Framework Before You Dial
Preparation separates intake interviews that produce usable briefs from those that produce vague notes requiring a follow-up. Before the call, the adviser should research the client's business publicly — industry, known office footprint if any, any recent corporate announcements about growth or contraction.
Building a question set in advance does not mean reading from a script. It means knowing which topic clusters you must cover and having at least two entry questions per cluster so you can adapt to the conversation's flow. The clusters, at minimum, are: occupancy drivers, headcount and density, operational requirements, financial constraints, timeline, and decision governance.
Advisers should also prepare a working hypothesis before the call. Based on what you know about the client's industry and size, what do you expect their density ratio to be? What lease term do companies at their stage typically require? Having a hypothesis sharpens your listening — you notice immediately when a client's answer contradicts your expectation, which is usually where the most important information lives.
Send a brief pre-read to the client the day before. A short document that lists the topic areas you will cover signals professionalism and allows the client to pull relevant data — current lease expiration dates, headcount by department, budget authority thresholds — before the meeting rather than scrambling during it.
Opening the Interview to Establish Diagnostic Intent
The opening minutes of the intake call determine whether the conversation stays at the surface or goes deep. Advisers who open with "So, how much space are you looking for?" immediately frame themselves as order-takers. The better opening states the purpose of the conversation explicitly.
A strong opening sounds something like: "Before we discuss any properties, I want to spend thirty to forty minutes understanding your business so the brief we build actually reflects your needs and constraints. Some of my questions will feel like they belong in a CFO meeting — that's intentional, because the lease decisions we make will have real financial consequences for your company over the term." That framing gives the client permission to go deep.
Establish early who else should be in the conversation. If you are speaking only with a facilities manager but the lease decision requires CFO sign-off, you need to know that now, not when heads of terms are on the table. Ask directly: "Who else has input on the requirements, and who has final approval authority?" Record the answer carefully — it defines the decision governance structure you will need to navigate.
Confirm the confidentiality expectations at the outset. Many clients are concerned about competitors learning they are in the market. Knowing their disclosure sensitivity affects how you manage broker-of-record relationships, how you approach landlords, and whether you can share the brief with any external parties.
Mapping Headcount Scenarios and Density Assumptions
Square footage is a derivative number. The correct sequence is: headcount, then density model, then program, then gross area. Advisers who start with square footage and work backward produce briefs that break the moment headcount assumptions shift.
Ask the client for current headcount by function, not just total employees. A hundred-person company where sixty people are in product development and forty are in sales has fundamentally different space requirements than a hundred-person company split evenly across five departments. Ancillary space requirements — labs, server rooms, training facilities, secure storage — emerge from function-level counts.
Then ask for headcount scenarios, not a single number. What does the company look like in twelve months? In three years? In five years? For a lease with a seven-year term, the planning horizon should extend to at least year four of occupancy. Advisers who build the brief around current headcount without a growth scenario often find their clients in expansion discussions by year two of a long-term lease, with no flexibility provisions in place.
Density assumptions are where many briefs go wrong silently. A client may say "open plan" and mean very different things depending on their culture, their industry, and what their leadership has seen on a competitor's office tour. Ask to see their current space utilization data if available, or ask how often the office is typically at full occupancy. The answer calibrates whether you plan for peak density or average density — two very different area numbers.
Identifying Operational Requirements That Affect Building Selection
Every business has operational requirements that go beyond raw square footage. Identifying them in the intake interview prevents the embarrassment of touring a beautiful building that cannot physically support what the client actually needs.
Power and data infrastructure requirements should be surfaced early for technology, financial services, and healthcare clients. Some users require dedicated HVAC for equipment rooms, redundant power feeds, or fiber diversity that only certain buildings in certain markets can provide. These requirements immediately filter the universe of eligible buildings before a single tour is scheduled.
Loading dock access, floor load ratings, and freight elevator dimensions matter for clients who handle physical inventory, media production equipment, or any manufacturing adjacency function. An adviser who does not ask these questions will occasionally tour a trophy office building with a client who needs a ten-thousand-pound floor load rating, which creates an awkward and time-consuming correction.
Amenity and proximity requirements are genuinely operational for many clients. A client whose staff commutes predominantly by public transit has a different location matrix than one whose executives arrive by car. Asking about commute patterns and near-building amenities is not small talk — it is a site scoring input that affects which submarkets belong on the shortlist and which should be excluded.
Security and access control requirements vary significantly. Some clients need 24/7 building access for shift operations. Others need dedicated freight entrances separate from client-facing lobbies. Financial services and government contractors may have specific security standards that affect floor selection, elevator access, and even window line orientation. All of these belong in the intake conversation.
Surfacing Financial Constraints and Lease Accounting Treatment
The financial conversation in an intake interview is the one most advisers avoid because it feels like it belongs to a different professional. That avoidance produces briefs with no economic guardrails and clients who reject proposals on price grounds that could have been anticipated in week one.
Ask directly for a target occupancy cost, expressed as a dollar amount per employee per year or as a percentage of projected revenue. If the client cannot provide a number, ask what the current all-in occupancy cost is and whether the new space needs to cost more, the same, or less. That anchor is enough to screen buildings before the financial modeling stage.
Lease accounting treatment under ASC 842 is now a material consideration for companies with audited financials. A client who carries all operating leases on balance sheet as right-of-use assets has different incentives around lease term, renewal options, and termination flexibility than one whose exposure is immaterial. Advisers who understand this distinction can structure recommendations around accounting outcomes, not just rental economics.
Ask about capital expenditure authority. If the client's fit-out budget requires board approval above a certain threshold, the adviser needs to know that threshold before recommending turnkey scenarios that assume landlord-funded buildout. The difference between a landlord-funded buildout and a tenant improvement allowance arrangement has balance sheet and cash flow implications the client's CFO will care about.
Incentives eligibility is another financial topic that belongs in intake. Some clients qualify for state or municipal economic development incentives tied to job creation or investment thresholds. Others have restrictions on accepting public incentives due to regulatory constraints. Knowing early allows the adviser to route the site selection process through markets where incentive programs exist and where the client can actually benefit from them.
Understanding Timeline Constraints and Critical Dates
Timeline is the constraint that most often overrides every other requirement. An adviser who understands the client's critical dates can prioritize the process correctly from the start rather than discovering a hard deadline six weeks before it expires.
Ask for the current lease expiration date immediately. Then ask whether holdover provisions exist and what the holdover rental rate would be. Some clients have favorable holdover terms that give the adviser a few months of additional runway. Others face penalty clauses or landlord termination rights that make the hard deadline truly hard. The difference materially affects negotiating leverage with prospective landlords.
Ask about internal planning milestones as well. Many corporate clients have capital budget cycles, board meeting schedules, or fiscal year boundaries that create de facto decision deadlines independent of the lease calendar. A client who must have space commitments approved in the Q3 board cycle has a different timeline than the lease expiration alone would suggest.
Build a preliminary critical-date calendar in the intake. Work backward from the target occupancy date through fit-out construction, permitting, landlord delivery, lease execution, board approval, and financial modeling review. This reverse timeline tells you how much time is actually available for the market search and negotiation phase, which is often less than clients initially expect.
Capturing Decision Governance and Internal Stakeholder Dynamics
The technical requirements of a brief can be excellent and still fail to produce a signed lease if the adviser has misread the internal decision structure. Decision governance is as important as any physical requirement.
Ask who the internal champion is for the project. The champion is the person who called you, but they are not always the decision-maker. Understanding the relationship between the champion and the approvers — whether they are aligned, whether there are competing internal agendas, and whether the project has senior sponsorship — shapes how you present options and whose objections you need to anticipate.
Ask whether there are any internal options already on the table. Clients sometimes have relationships with landlords they have worked with before, or internal factions advocating for a renewal in the existing space. Knowing about these alternatives early allows the adviser to build a comparison framework that addresses those options directly rather than being blindsided by them in a recommendation meeting.
Ask about any geographic or location constraints driven by internal politics rather than operational logic. A CEO who lives in a particular suburb may have strong preferences about which side of the city the new office occupies. These preferences are rarely stated explicitly, but they will derail a shortlist that ignores them. A direct question — "Are there any location preferences driven by leadership that we should factor into the search?" — usually surfaces them.
Building the Draft Brief from Interview Outputs
The brief is the structured output of the intake process, and it should read as a document someone could defend under scrutiny. It is not a summary of the conversation — it is an organized set of requirements, constraints, scenarios, and open items that will guide the site selection process.
Organize the brief into sections that mirror the diagnostic clusters: space program, operational requirements, financial parameters, timeline, decision governance, and open items requiring follow-up. Each section should state the requirement, its source (who said it and in what context), and its classification — mandatory, preferred, or flexible. This classification allows the adviser to apply a scoring matrix when evaluating properties against the brief.
The scoring matrix converts qualitative requirements into a defensible comparison tool. Assign weights to each requirement category based on the client's stated priorities. Location access might carry thirty percent of the weight for a client whose talent acquisition strategy depends on transit proximity. Floor plate efficiency might carry twenty-five percent for a client whose density model is tight. The weights are inputs the client should validate before the matrix is applied to actual buildings.
Open items should be tracked explicitly. Clients almost never provide every required piece of information in one conversation. Headcount projections may be pending a board decision. IT infrastructure requirements may need a facilities assessment. The brief should list these gaps clearly so both sides understand what information is still needed and by when. This transparency also protects the adviser — if a recommendation later proves wrong because a client withheld or delayed information, the open-item log documents the gap.
The brief should end with an explicit sign-off section. The client should read and confirm the documented requirements before the market search begins. That confirmation creates a shared baseline and reduces scope creep as the process advances.
Using the Brief to Structure the Site Selection Process
A well-constructed brief converts the site selection phase from an art project into an evaluation discipline. Every building that enters the shortlist should be screened against the brief's mandatory requirements before it consumes the client's time on a tour.
The mandatory requirement screen is a binary pass-fail gate. A building that cannot accommodate the client's minimum power requirements, falls outside the acceptable submarket, or cannot deliver by the client's hard move-in date does not enter the active shortlist regardless of how attractive its rental economics appear. This discipline saves significant time and maintains the client's trust that you are curating, not just presenting.
Preferred requirements become scoring inputs for buildings that clear the mandatory gate. A building that scores highly on floor plate efficiency, transit access, and amenity proximity advances over one that meets only the mandatory criteria.
Financial modeling follows the shortlist, not the other way around. Many advisers run preliminary numbers on too many buildings, creating noise and confusing clients with options that have not been properly vetted against the full requirement set. Build the financial comparison on the buildings that have cleared both the mandatory screen and the preference scoring. This sequencing produces cleaner comparative analysis and cleaner client conversations.
Documenting Assumptions for Financial Modeling
The financial comparison is only as credible as the assumptions behind it. Advisers who present a lease net present value analysis without documenting the discount rate, the assumed rent escalation, the tenant improvement allowance timing, and the free rent structure invite disputes that undermine the recommendation.
A disciplined assumption log accompanies every financial model. It should state the assumed lease term, the base rent at commencement, any step-up schedule, the free rent period, the tenant improvement allowance amount and delivery timing, the discount rate used for NPV calculation, and any operating expense assumptions that affect net effective rent. Each assumption should reference its source — either a landlord proposal or a hypothetical figure labeled clearly as such.
Calculating lease net present value and comparing net effective rent across options is the core of tenant-side financial analysis. The effective rent calculation normalizes free rent and tenant improvement allowances across lease terms of different lengths, which is the only fair basis for comparison when landlords have structured proposals differently to obscure the economic equivalence or divergence. Hypothetical examples used to illustrate methodology should always be labeled as illustrative and should not be presented as market benchmarks.
This transparency matters especially when a recommendation is contested internally.
Managing Scope Drift During the Search
The requirements brief is a living document in the sense that new information legitimately changes requirements. It is not a document that should be casually revised every time a client sees a building they like and decides they want different criteria. Managing scope drift is an adviser's professional responsibility.
When a client asks to change a requirement during the search, the right response is to treat that as a formal revision rather than a quiet update to the working file. Document what changed, why it changed, and what the downstream effect is on the shortlist. If a submarket change invalidates three buildings already under analysis, the client should understand that explicitly.
Scope drift is usually a symptom of incomplete intake. The most common driver is a requirement that was not surfaced in the initial conversation because the client assumed it was obvious, or because the adviser did not ask the right question. This is why thorough intake methodology pays dividends throughout the process — it reduces the frequency and magnitude of mid-search corrections.
Closing the Interview and Confirming Next Steps
The intake interview should close with explicit confirmation of what has been captured and what comes next. Summarize the key requirements aloud before ending the call and ask the client to flag anything that sounds incorrect or incomplete. This in-call validation is faster than a written revision cycle.
Confirm the follow-up deliverables and their due dates. The adviser commits to a draft brief by a specific date. The client commits to providing outstanding information — headcount projections, IT requirements, existing lease documentation — by a date that allows the brief to be finalized before the market search begins.
Establish a standing communication cadence. Tenant representation processes stall when advisers go quiet and clients assume progress is happening. Agree on a weekly or biweekly check-in format, what updates will be shared in writing versus discussed verbally, and how decisions will be documented. This cadence agreement, made in the intake meeting, sets professional expectations that govern the entire engagement.
The intake interview is not a formality. Advisers who treat it as the most consequential meeting in the engagement — not the lease signing, not the tour day — build practices with dramatically lower rework, higher client satisfaction, and stronger referral pipelines. The discipline of the intake is what separates advisers who guide clients from those who merely accompany them.
Keeping the Brief Connected Through the Engagement
A requirements brief loses its utility quickly if it exists as a static document that the adviser references in week one and then forgets. The best practices in the industry treat the brief as a living record that is cited at every decision point throughout the engagement.
When a property advances to a letter of intent stage, the adviser should formally reconcile the LOI terms against the requirements brief. Where terms deviate from stated requirements — shorter lease term than preferred, higher operating expenses than budgeted — those deviations should be documented and either justified or escalated to the client for decision. This reconciliation discipline protects the client and protects the adviser's professional reputation.
The intake interview, properly executed, is an act of professional discipline that cascades forward into every phase of the engagement. Building and maintaining the habit — across every client, every project, every market cycle — is how tenant representation advisers build practices that clients trust with consequential decisions.
About Advantai
Advantai is a commercial real estate intelligence and operations platform operated by ADVANTAGE AI LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. It connects client relationships, property research, documents and financial decisions in one workspace for commercial real estate teams — advisers and brokerage teams, occupier and facility teams, and portfolio teams. The platform covers CRM and origination, requirements and site selection, Property X-Ray (an interactive 3D building workspace), financial modeling and comparison, document intelligence, transactions and diligence, client collaboration, and portfolio strategy with critical dates. The optional Super Agent upgrade adds specialist, source-backed research and automated scenario analysis.
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