How to find a new commercial property tenant: Chris Lang
At some point, your commercial tenant will simply move on. It just happens from time to time.
Therefore, what we'll do here is explore some creative ways to address this and still maintain your sanity, at the same time.
But no matter which approach you adopt, there are several things you always need to do.
1. Obtain (or compile) a list of potential tenants to target.
This may be by geography (i.e. businesses located in the surrounding area); or
It may be by business category (i.e. 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?
As old-fashioned as this may sound, I still tend to go first to a hard copy of the 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 8 to 10 business categories, and maybe out as far as 5 km.
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 and six potential starters.
2. Establish who you should be speaking to.
Interestingly, it's not always the CEO. Sometimes it will be the office manager; other times, the financial control.
You may need to have someone else call up beforehand, to establish exactly who the decision-maker is, so that you can straight away ask to be put through to that person.
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 for when it comes to making those "cold calls".
Bottom line: This should give you some fresh insights on how easy it is for you to make your cold calls and be successful, whenever you have a vacancy, even in a tough market.
Chris Langis an advisor to commercial property investors, sell-out author and regular speaker on how to invest in commercial property. You can visit his website Property Edge Australia to help you get the most out of your commercial property investing.