The hardest search to brief is the one with no anchor point. When a client has no existing building to benchmark, no lease expiry driving the timeline, and no geography already chosen, the adviser's first job is not to find properties — it is to construct a requirements brief rigorous enough to filter hundreds of possible markets down to a handful of serious candidates. That work, done poorly, produces a confused search that wastes months. Done well, it becomes the governing document for every subsequent decision.
Why Location-Agnostic Searches Demand a Different Brief
A conventional brief assumes a city, a submarket, sometimes even a building type. The team fills in size, term, and budget around a known geography. A location-agnostic search inverts that logic entirely.
When location itself is a variable, every other dimension of the brief has to carry more weight. The brief must encode the client's business logic so clearly that any geography can be evaluated against the same standard, without the adviser having to revisit first principles each time a new market is introduced.
This matters operationally because location-agnostic searches tend to expand before they contract. Without a sharp brief, the long list of candidate markets grows to an unmanageable size, consuming research resources and adviser time before a single proposal has been issued. The brief is the filter that keeps the search tractable.
When criteria shift mid-search — as they often do — the original document creates a reference point. The team can discuss whether a proposed change is a genuine evolution of the client's needs or a reaction to a single property that looked attractive in isolation.
Understanding What the Client Actually Needs Before Writing Anything
The temptation is to open a template and start populating fields. Resist it. Before a word of the brief is written, the adviser should conduct a structured intake session that separates three distinct layers of client need: operational requirements, organizational constraints, and strategic intent.
Operational requirements are the most concrete layer. They include workforce headcount, the functions that must be physically co-located, any equipment or infrastructure specifications, and the minimum quality standard for the building. These translate directly into brief language because they can be verified and measured.
Organizational constraints are one layer up. They include board-level approvals required above certain cost thresholds, internal real estate governance timelines, and HR commitments that may affect which geographies are feasible — particularly if existing employees would be asked to relocate. These constraints define the decision envelope within which the search must operate.
Strategic intent sits at the top. Why is this organization entering a new location, or why are they willing to consider any location at all? The answer might be talent access, logistics positioning, cost arbitrage, or regulatory proximity. Understanding strategic intent lets the adviser challenge requirements that conflict with the stated goal — before those conflicts become expensive.
Defining the Workforce Footprint Without Assuming a City
The workforce section of a location-agnostic brief has to do more work than it would in a conventional search. Rather than specifying headcount against a known labor market, it must specify the type of talent required so that labor availability can be tested across candidate geographies later in the process.
The most useful approach is to build a role taxonomy for the brief: group the positions the client needs to fill or retain into labor categories that map to Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational codes or equivalent national classification systems. This creates a consistent basis for comparing talent supply across markets. Without this translation step, labor availability assessments in different markets become incomparable.
The brief should also distinguish between roles the client intends to hire locally, roles that will transfer from existing locations, and roles that may be performed remotely. Each category has different real estate implications. Locally hired roles create dependency on the destination labor market. Transferred roles create an implicit geographic constraint because the talent must actually be willing to move. Remote roles may reduce the net square footage required.
One additional element that often goes undocumented is the client's flexibility on hybrid schedules. If the organization expects the new space to be occupied three days per week at peak, the utilization assumption affects both the size of the brief and the cost model that will be built against it. Getting this number into the brief early prevents it from being revised repeatedly when financial comparisons are run later.
Building the Size and Configuration Framework
Size is deceptively complex in a location-agnostic brief. The right square footage in a dense urban market, with its conventions around workstation density and shared amenity space, may be entirely wrong for a suburban campus environment. The brief must specify size in terms the client actually cares about — seats, collaboration zones, private offices — and let the adviser translate those into gross square footage for each market being evaluated.
The configuration framework should state the client's requirements for each function that will occupy the space: heads-down workstations, conference and collaboration rooms, specialized technical areas, amenity provisions such as food service or fitness, and any operational areas like server rooms, storage, or receiving. Stating these as a ratio — for example, one enclosed conference room per twenty workstations — makes the framework portable across building types and markets.
It is also worth specifying which configuration elements are fixed and which are negotiable. A laboratory that requires specific structural load ratings is non-negotiable. A preference for open-plan workstations over assigned offices is negotiable. Distinguishing between these categories prevents the search from treating every requirement as equally weighted, which causes good buildings to be eliminated for trivial reasons.
Floor-plate efficiency assumptions belong in this section too. A client requiring a single floor of contiguous space in a 25,000 square-foot requirement will face very different market conditions than a client willing to occupy multiple floors across a building. The brief should state whether vertical contiguity matters, what the minimum single-floor plate size must be, and whether the client can accommodate a phased delivery of space if the first phase is available immediately and expansion space is delivered later.
Establishing Financial Parameters That Travel Across Markets
A budget expressed as a dollar-per-square-foot rent figure is essentially useless in a location-agnostic search because that number means different things in different markets. The brief should instead articulate financial parameters in terms of total occupancy cost per employee per year, or as a percentage of projected revenue from the operation. Both metrics translate across markets because they anchor cost to business outcomes rather than local market conventions.
Total occupancy cost should be defined clearly in the brief to include base rent, operating expenses, any landlord or government taxes passed through the lease, the amortized cost of tenant improvements above the landlord allowance, and recurring soft costs like property management fees or parking charges. This prevents apple-to-orange comparisons when proposals from different markets arrive with different cost structures embedded in the lease.
Capital efficiency expectations also belong in the financial section. If the client expects the landlord to fund a substantial portion of the fit-out through tenant improvement allowances, the brief should state that expectation explicitly. Markets with strong leasing velocity may offer thinner allowances than markets with higher vacancy. Building that expectation into the brief from the outset prevents the client from being surprised when they discover that the most attractive labor market also has the least flexible landlord community.
The brief should state the client's appetite for lease term explicitly. A client willing to commit to a ten-year term opens up a different set of financial negotiations than a client seeking maximum flexibility through a five-year initial term with options. This is not simply a preference — it has direct implications for how landlords will price the transaction and how the adviser should position offers in markets where supply is tight.
The financial parameters section should also address how the client expects occupancy cost to be evaluated across a multi-year horizon. A ten-year lease in a low-cost market may deliver a different total cost outcome than a shorter lease in a higher-cost market once rent escalations, renewal risk, and fit-out amortization are factored in. The brief should specify that the financial comparison will account for multi-year cost dynamics, so the adviser and the financial model builder are working from the same instruction set.
Writing the Site-Selection Criteria and Weighting System
This is the section of the brief that transforms a search with no fixed location from an open-ended investigation into a structured evaluation. The site-selection criteria should be exhaustive at first and then deliberately narrowed to the factors that genuinely differentiate candidate markets.
The standard categories for a location-agnostic search criteria matrix include: labor market quality and depth; infrastructure and connectivity including broadband, power reliability, and transportation access; real estate market conditions such as available supply, construction pipeline, and typical lease structure; operating cost environment including local taxes, utility costs, and regulatory compliance overhead; and quality-of-place factors that affect employee attraction and retention.
Each category should carry a weight, expressed as a percentage, that reflects how much it matters relative to the others. A technology company prioritizing talent acquisition may weight labor market quality at forty percent and operating cost at fifteen percent. A logistics operation may invert those priorities entirely. The weights must reflect the client's strategic intent as established in the intake session — not the adviser's assumptions about what clients in that industry usually care about.
Within each category, the brief should define the scoring method. A five-point scale applied consistently across markets produces comparable results. The brief should specify what a score of five looks like in concrete terms for each criterion. For labor market depth, a five might mean the metropolitan statistical area has at least a defined threshold of workers in the target occupational categories. Using a hypothetical threshold as an illustrative example, a team might set that at twenty thousand workers in the relevant codes — labeled clearly as a client-specific assumption, not a market standard.
Identifying Threshold Criteria Versus Preference Criteria
Not all criteria belong in the scoring matrix. Some criteria are binary: a market either meets them or it does not, and failure to meet them eliminates the market from consideration entirely. These are threshold criteria, and they should be listed separately at the front of the evaluation framework.
Threshold criteria in a location-agnostic search commonly include: regulatory requirements such as operating licenses that are only available in certain jurisdictions; infrastructure minimums such as fiber connectivity at a specified redundancy level; proximity constraints if the client must maintain a maximum travel time to an existing facility; and legal constraints such as requirements to operate within a specific country or state for data sovereignty reasons.
Separating threshold criteria from preference criteria disciplines the search in two ways. First, it prevents time from being spent scoring markets that cannot legally or operationally qualify. Second, it forces the client to be explicit about which requirements are truly non-negotiable — a conversation that often surfaces hidden flexibility the client did not know they had.
Preference criteria are everything that remains after threshold screening. These get scored and weighted. The scoring produces a ranked list of candidate markets, not a single correct answer, and the brief should frame it that way. The purpose of the weighted scorecard is to surface the trade-offs between markets, not to automate the client's decision.
Documenting Assumptions and Their Sources
A requirements brief for a search with no fixed location will be used over a period of months, often by multiple people including the client's internal real estate team, their legal counsel, and external advisers across different markets. Every assumption embedded in the brief must be documented with its source and its sensitivity.
Assumptions about headcount should reference the client's current workforce plan and note when that plan was last updated. If the brief assumes a growth trajectory — say, a fifty percent increase in headcount over five years, used here as a hypothetical illustration — it should note that the real estate strategy was sized to that projection and that a material change to the projection would require the brief to be revisited.
Cost assumptions are particularly important to source. If the financial parameters in the brief were calibrated against a broker-provided market survey of occupancy costs in a set of candidate markets, that survey should be referenced by date. Markets move; a brief calibrated against data that is eighteen months old may send the team into negotiations with incorrect expectations.
The assumption documentation section also serves a risk management function. When a client asks why the team is recommending a particular market over another, the brief's assumption log lets the adviser show their work transparently — which criteria drove the recommendation, what data supported each criterion score, and where the analysis is sensitive to inputs that could change.
Structuring the Brief as a Living Document
The conventional mistake is to treat the requirements brief as a deliverable — something produced at the start of the engagement and then filed. A location-agnostic brief has to function as a living document because the search will generate information that changes what the client knows and, sometimes, what they want.
Build an amendment process into the brief from the start. Any proposed change to the weighted criteria or threshold requirements should require a formal revision, documented with the date and the reason for the change. This creates accountability without making the brief rigid. It allows genuine evolution of the client's thinking while preventing the creep that comes from accommodating a single building that the client happens to like.
A version-controlled brief also protects the adviser. When a client changes the size requirement upward in month four because an internal headcount projection was revised, the original brief documents what was understood at the outset. This is not a defensive posture — it is a professional practice that keeps the engagement on track and the client relationship constructive.
Running the Initial Market Screening Against the Brief
Once the brief is complete and signed off by the client, the first use is a market screening exercise that eliminates geographies unable to meet threshold criteria and ranks the survivors by weighted score. This exercise typically produces a long list of eight to fifteen markets, depending on how broadly the client defined the initial geography.
The screening should use consistent data sources for each criterion. Labor market data typically comes from national statistical agencies or commercial labor analytics providers. Real estate market data comes from the adviser's own market knowledge, supplemented by research services. Infrastructure data may require direct inquiry with utilities or government economic development agencies.
The output of the screening is not a recommendation — it is a structured basis for conversation. The weighted rankings tell the client which markets performed best against their stated criteria. The adviser's job at this stage is to overlay qualitative judgment: which markets have political environments that add risk, which are showing signs of market tightening that the data has not yet captured, and which have economic development incentives available that the basic scoring did not account for.
Connecting the Requirements Brief to the Financial Evaluation
A well-constructed requirements brief anchors every stage of the search, including the financial analysis that will ultimately drive the client's location decision. When the brief has established a consistent definition of total occupancy cost and documented the financial parameters the client cares about, the team running the lease comparison or multi-market cost model has a clear instruction set to work from.
This connection matters because financial comparisons across markets can be constructed in ways that favor almost any answer if the inputs are not constrained by an agreed framework. The brief creates that framework. It specifies what cost components are included, what lease terms are assumed for comparison purposes, and how the client expects to evaluate costs across time. When those parameters are set in the brief and not revisited ad hoc during the financial modeling stage, the analysis is more credible and the client's decision is better supported.
Without that integration, the financial model often drifts from the brief as assumptions get adjusted locally by whoever is building the model, without those changes being reflected in the governing document. The brief should therefore include an explicit note that the financial comparison parameters documented in it are the controlling inputs for any cost analysis conducted during the search.
Presenting the Shortlist to the Client
The shortlist presentation is the moment when the requirements brief does its most important work. Rather than presenting a ranked list of markets as a recommendation, the adviser should frame the presentation around the brief: here are the criteria the client set, here is how each shortlisted market performed against each criterion, and here are the trade-offs the client must weigh to reach a decision.
This framing serves the client's decision-making process better than a simple recommendation because a location decision at this scale involves considerations that the brief may not fully capture — board relationships, executive preferences, community ties. By presenting the analysis transparently against the client's own criteria, the adviser gives the client a basis for integrating those additional factors rather than overriding a recommendation that feels opaque.
Final Quality Check Before the Brief Goes to the Client
Before any requirements brief is shared with the client, it should pass a structured internal review. The review should check that every threshold criterion has a clear pass-or-fail test that can be applied consistently across markets. It should confirm that the weighted scoring criteria are mutually exclusive — that no two criteria are measuring the same thing under different names. And it should verify that the financial parameters are internally consistent: that the occupancy cost per employee the brief targets is achievable at the size, term, and specification the brief describes.
The brief should also be reviewed for assumptions that have not been sourced. Any number in the brief that cannot be traced to a document, a data source, or a client conversation is a risk. If the assumption is wrong, and it cannot be corrected because no one knows where it came from, the entire scoring exercise built on top of it is unreliable.
Structuring the brief as a rigorous, source-backed document also disciplines the internal review conversation. If every number has a source, reviewers can challenge the sources rather than argue about the numbers — which is a faster and more productive form of quality assurance.
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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