What can you do when your tenant leaves? Chris Lang

The first thing you need to do is come up with some creative ways to address this and still maintain your sanity, at the same time.

But no matter what your approach may be, there are several things you always need to do.

1. Secure (or compile) a Target List of Potential Tenants

• This may be by geography (ie: businesses located in the surrounding area); or
• It may be by business category (ie: types of businesses you feel your property would ideally suit).

The geographical approach is best suited to industrial property.

In which case, you simply get in your car and drive around the nearby streets — noting down the firms who occupy premises of roughly the same size as yours.

But what about the list by business category?

No matter how old-fashioned as this may sound, you will find it best to start with a hard copy of Yellow Pages.

Using your category list, you look up those specific business types located in and around where your property is located.

Exactly how many categories (and how far you spread from your property) is up to you. However, I would probably be suggesting eight to 10 business categories; and maybe as far away as 5 kilometres.

In any event, you should be looking to come up with a list of around 300 firms to call. That way (and based upon my 2% success rate), you should then end up with between five or six potential starters.

2. WHO is the Key Person you should speak to?

Interestingly, it's not always the CEO. Sometimes it will be the office manager; other times, maybe the financial controller.

You may need to have someone else call up beforehand, to establish exactly who the decision-maker is so that you can ask to be put through to that person, when you call.

Now you've compiled your list of target firms to contact and identified the key people involved, you may find it helpful to actually role-play a couple of very successful tele-scripts.

Bottom line: Hopefully, this has gives you a few fresh insights into just how easy it is for you to make your cold calls and be successful — whenever you have a vacancy, even in a tough market.