The first conversation between a landlord representative and a new owner client sets the trajectory for every decision that follows — the pricing strategy, the ideal tenant profile, the approval chain, and the commission structure. Getting those answers upfront is not a formality; it is how a leasing adviser protects both the owner's asset and their own time. The framework known informally as the 7 Questions Landlord Representatives Should Ask a New Owner Client has circulated among experienced leasing professionals for good reason: it forces clarity before the first prospect walks through the door.
What Is the Owner's Actual Hold Period and Exit Thesis
Leasing strategy is inseparable from disposition strategy. An owner planning to refinance and hold for seven years wants long-term, creditworthy tenants with renewal options that lock in occupancy. An owner preparing to sell within eighteen months may prioritize near-term rent commencement over lease term length to dress the rent roll for a buyer's underwriting.
Ask directly what the intended hold period is, and then ask whether that has been stress-tested against the debt maturity schedule. A five-year hold thesis attached to a loan maturing in two years is a strategy under pressure, and your leasing approach should reflect that urgency. A tenant you sign to a ten-year lease may be ideal for a long-term holder but irrelevant if the building trades before year three.
The exit thesis also shapes the creditworthiness threshold you apply to prospective tenants. Institutional buyers applying a traditional income-capitalization valuation model place real weight on tenant credit. A building leased to a collection of underfunded startups at market rent may appraise lower than one with slightly below-market leases to nationally recognized credits.
Understanding the hold period also helps you set accurate expectations about the leasing commission timeline. If the owner expects to sell quickly, a commission agreement that ties your compensation to lease execution rather than lease commencement protects your interests.
What Does the Owner Consider the Competitive Set
Owners and their advisers frequently disagree on the appropriate competitive set, and that disagreement produces misaligned pricing from day one. An owner who bought the building based on a proforma rent of sixty dollars per square foot may resist adjusting to a market that has moved. The conversation about competitive properties needs to happen before you publish any asking rates.
Walk the owner through your proposed comp set and explain the selection methodology: direct vacancy in the same submarket, similar floor-plate efficiency, comparable base building condition, and analogous parking ratios. If the owner objects to a specific comp, ask why. Sometimes their objection reveals information about a recent transaction or a relationship you were not aware of.
The competitive set question also surfaces the owner's tolerance for concessions. If nearby buildings are offering fifteen months of free rent on seven-year deals, your owner needs to know that before responding to a tenant's first counterproposal. Some owners view concessions as cash out the door; others understand the effective rent math. Finding out which camp your owner is in early prevents embarrassing miscommunications with prospects.
Recording the agreed competitive set in writing also anchors future pricing conversations. When market conditions shift, you can return to the same framework and show objectively why the asking rate or the concession package should be adjusted.
What Tenant Profile Does the Owner Actually Want in the Building
This question sounds obvious, but the honest answer is often more specific — and more complicated — than the initial response suggests. Owners may have lender covenants that prohibit certain use categories. They may have existing tenants whose lease agreements contain exclusivity clauses that restrict competing businesses. They may have preferences rooted in the building's brand positioning that they have never articulated out loud.
Start with the functional parameters: minimum creditworthiness standard, preferred lease term range, acceptable use categories, and any prohibited uses written into existing leases or financing documents. Then move to the softer preferences: does the owner want anchor tenants who can co-sign on amenity improvements? Is there a preference for local businesses over national chains for placemaking reasons?
The credit floor matters enormously for how you qualify inbound inquiries. If the owner requires a minimum tangible net worth or a personal guarantee from a principal with documented assets, you should not be spending time touring tenants who cannot meet that standard. Define the floor clearly and get it confirmed in writing as part of your leasing guidelines.
The profile question also affects how you market the building. A building targeting professional services firms needs a different broker-outreach strategy than one targeting light industrial users or medical office operators. Your marketing spend and your co-broke positioning both follow from the tenant profile conversation.
What Are the Owner's Economics on Tenant Improvement Allowance
Tenant improvement allowance is frequently the sticking point in lease negotiations, and owners' actual capacity to fund it varies widely from their stated willingness. Ask not just what the owner is prepared to offer but what the building's capital position actually supports. A leveraged owner with a tight debt service coverage ratio may have genuine constraints on TI that their posture in conversation does not reveal.
The structural question is whether the owner intends to fund TI out of operating cash flow, from a capital reserve account, or by recapturing it in the effective rent calculation. Each approach has different implications for how you present the deal to tenants and to the lender whose consent may be required for any lease above a certain size. If the lender must approve leases exceeding a certain square footage threshold, TI funding may become part of a broader conversation about capital expenditures.
Also ask whether the owner has a preferred TI structure: a fixed allowance per square foot, a turnkey buildout, or a landlord-performed work letter. Each structure creates different risk allocation between the parties. A turnkey buildout shifts cost-overrun risk to the landlord; a fixed allowance shifts it to the tenant. Understanding the owner's preference before you begin negotiations helps you draft deal points that are consistent with their actual capacity.
The effective rent calculation — which converts face rent, free rent, and TI into a net present value on a per-square-foot basis for comparison purposes — should be part of your early discussions. Hypothetically, a ten-year lease at fifty dollars per square foot with fifteen months free rent and sixty dollars per square foot of TI has a materially different economics profile than one at fifty dollars with no concessions.
What Is the Owner's Tolerance for Lease Complexity
Not all owners are equipped to manage the ongoing obligations that complex leases create. A full-service gross lease negotiated with a sophisticated tenant may include audit rights, co-tenancy provisions, percentage rent triggers, HVAC exclusivity schedules, and operating expense exclusion lists that require active management for the duration of the term. An owner without a professional property management team may not appreciate what they are committing to.
Ask specifically whether the owner uses an internal property management department, a third-party manager, or is managing the building themselves. The answer shapes what lease structures are realistic. An owner managing a small suburban office building on a part-time basis probably cannot administer a lease with thirty-page operating expense reconciliation requirements without professional support.
The complexity tolerance question also surfaces preferred lease form. Some owners insist on using their standard form document as the starting point; others are willing to negotiate from the tenant's form. Each approach has cost and time implications. Starting from the tenant's counsel's draft, for instance, typically requires more legal hours to claw back favorable landlord positions.
For owners who are new to leasing commercial space — perhaps a family that inherited the building or an investor who has historically held residential assets — the lease complexity conversation is an opportunity to educate. Walk them through the difference between a net lease, a modified gross lease, and a full-service gross lease. Explain the concept of base year and what expense stops mean in practice. An informed owner makes faster decisions and fewer costly revisions during negotiation.
How Does the Owner Define Leasing Success and What Is the Commission Structure
The final question in the 7 Questions Landlord Representatives Should Ask a New Owner Client framework is the one that most advisers approach too delicately. Clear agreement on what success looks like — and how the adviser is compensated for achieving it — prevents almost every dispute that arises at the end of a transaction.
Define success quantitatively where possible. Is the primary goal full occupancy within twelve months? Achieving a specific weighted average lease term? Hitting a target effective rent per square foot? Or stabilizing occupancy ahead of a financing event? Each objective implies a different set of priorities that may produce trade-offs the owner needs to acknowledge explicitly.
The commission structure conversation should cover the basics — the commission rate or dollar amount, whether co-broke splits are included or paid on top, and how commissions are treated if a deal falls out after execution. But it should also address the timing of payment. Many owners prefer to pay leasing commissions in tranches tied to lease execution and tenant occupancy. Advisers should understand and agree to those terms in writing before investing significant time in the assignment.
A secondary but important point is the exclusivity arrangement. Is the owner willing to grant the adviser an exclusive listing, or do they intend to engage multiple brokers? Exclusive listings almost always produce better outcomes for both parties because the adviser has an incentive to invest in marketing and qualification. The terms of exclusivity — its duration, the carve-out for existing prospects, and the tail period after termination — belong in the listing agreement, not in a handshake.
Building the Leasing Brief Before the First Tour
Once the seven questions are answered, the responses should be consolidated into a written leasing brief that documents the owner's parameters, preferences, and constraints. This brief becomes the reference document for every internal conversation, every co-broke disclosure, and every counterproposal review. Advisers who skip this step tend to find themselves re-litigating settled points with ownership at inconvenient moments.
The leasing brief should include the ownership structure and approval chain, the hold period and exit thesis, the defined competitive set and target asking rent, the approved tenant profile and credit requirements, the TI budget and preferred structure, the acceptable lease forms, and the commission agreement. Each element should be confirmed in writing by the owner's designated representative before the assignment moves forward.
The Competitive Set Analysis as an Ongoing Practice
Most leasing advisers do an initial competitive set analysis at engagement and then revisit it only when a tenant pushes back on pricing. That reactive approach puts the adviser in a defensive position during negotiations. A better practice is to review the competitive set on a defined schedule — monthly in active submarkets, quarterly in slower ones — and to share that review with the owner proactively.
Each competitive set update should include direct availability by floor-plate size, asking rents and disclosed effective rents, concession packages, and any new leases signed in the submarket. If a competitor building recently signed a significant lease that tightened availability, that is information the owner needs to adjust their pricing posture. If the opposite has happened and new vacancy has entered the market, the owner should know before they counter a tenant's best offer.
The competitive analysis also informs the tenant qualification process. When you understand the full range of options available to a prospective tenant, you can assess the seriousness of their interest more accurately. A tenant who is actively touring four competing buildings on similar timelines is a different prospect than one who has identified your building as their preferred option.
Qualifying Inbound Inquiries Against the Leasing Brief
With the leasing brief established and the competitive set understood, the qualification process becomes much more straightforward. Every inbound inquiry — whether it comes through a co-broke call, a direct tenant approach, or a requirement posted on a listing service — should be measured against the parameters the owner has already approved.
The qualification checklist should address: does the use category fit the approved profile? Does the tenant's estimated credit profile meet the owner's stated minimum? Is the required term within the acceptable range? Is the timing of required occupancy consistent with the space's delivery readiness? These are questions that can be answered in a brief initial conversation or through a requirements brief before a tour is scheduled.
For owners who have not established a clear tenant profile, the early qualification conversations often reveal the parameters implicitly. When an owner declines a particular tenant inquiry, asking why surfaces the actual preference that was not fully articulated in the initial intake conversation. Documenting those responses builds the leasing brief iteratively even when the initial conversation was incomplete.
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Managing Owner Expectations Through the Leasing Campaign
A new owner client who has not leased commercial space before often has expectations about timing, tenant quality, and deal pace that are disconnected from how the market actually operates. Setting accurate expectations is part of the adviser's professional responsibility, and it is much easier to do when you have the answers to the seven core questions in front of you.
Leasing timelines vary considerably by market, submarket, and building type. A mid-rise office building in a major urban market with strong demand may generate qualified tours within weeks. A suburban flex property in a secondary market may sit without a meaningful inquiry for months. The owner needs to understand realistic timeframes before interpreting silence as a failure of marketing.
Deal pace is equally important to calibrate. From the first tour to executed lease, a typical commercial transaction involves multiple site visits, a request for proposal, a letter of intent negotiation, lease document drafting and redlining, and any required lender or co-investor approvals. Each of those steps has its own elapsed time. Owners who expect to sign a lease within weeks of the first tour are almost always disappointed unless they are operating in an unusually tight market.
A regular reporting cadence — written tour reports, inquiry logs, and competitive set updates delivered on a defined schedule — keeps the owner informed and builds the documentation trail that protects the adviser if the relationship becomes adversarial. Every tour should be logged, every offer received should be summarized in writing, and every owner decision should be confirmed by email before the adviser acts on it.
Using the Leasing Brief to Anchor Counterproposal Strategy
When a tenant submits an offer, the leasing brief becomes the decision framework. Rather than going back to the owner from scratch on each deal point, the adviser can evaluate the offer against already-approved parameters and identify only the points that require a new owner decision. This reduces the turnaround time on counterproposals and presents the adviser as organized and decisive to both sides.
The effective rent analysis is the central tool for evaluating any offer. Converting face rent, free rent, rent abatement, TI, and other concessions into a net present value on a per-square-foot basis allows a direct comparison against the asking rate and against competing offers in the market. For any reasonably complex deal structure, that analysis should be documented and shared with the owner so their decision is based on economics, not on the most visible number in the proposal.
Closing Out the Engagement With Documentation and Transition
When a lease is executed, the leasing adviser's active role in the transaction concludes — but the documentation work is not finished. A complete engagement file should include the signed leasing brief, all tour logs, every offer and counteroffer exchanged in writing, the executed lease, and the commission payment confirmation. That file protects the adviser and the owner in the event of a future dispute about terms, approvals, or compensation.
If the owner's strategy calls for the same adviser to handle the next availability in the building, the transition conversation should include a review of what was learned during the leasing campaign. Which tenant profile assumptions proved accurate? Which competitive set assumptions had to be revised? What concession levels actually cleared the market? That information feeds directly into the next leasing brief and makes every subsequent assignment more efficient.
The relationship with the owner client should outlast the individual transaction. Advisers who stay in contact with owners between active assignments — sharing submarket data, relevant lease comps, or capital markets information — are the ones who receive the first call when the next space opens up. The seven intake questions are the beginning of that relationship, not the entirety of it.
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