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How to Leverage Your Real Estate Broker

How to Leverage Your Real Estate Broker by George Grace

One important reason to hire an exclusive real estate professional

“Why hire an exclusive real estate broker to represent you when finding space?” is a question that I find fairly often. Some benefits, like managing the logistics of viewings, are easy to imagine, but there are others that many would-be tenants do not come to appreciate until they are in the process. In the interest of getting around that gap in understanding, in this post, I offer a case study.

A nonprofit had a problem. They are headquartered in Brooklyn, in a location where they cannot find enough specialized employees. They would have to find a space that can accommodate what had become a sizable operation. Instead of searching for one large location, they decided to acquire two smaller locations.

This is the point when the person in charge of finding the new spaces fell into a classic trap: he began to attack the problem by looking at potential new locations one at a time, in a serial fashion, as opposed to looking at “the market” as a whole—simultaneously.

When a tenant looks at locations sequentially, a bias develops in which the last space they look at always seems to be the best one. It’s called a recency bias. If the same tenant were to take a parallel method of evaluating spaces, they would have a much clearer picture of what the market is—and where the value is.

Since this particular tenant is looking for three separate locations, the person in charge was looking at a lot of work ahead of him. I suggested he hire us, or someone like us, who will go into the marketplace and do a thorough search of the entire market at the same time, examining and verifying every potential option.

In commercial real estate, answers are rarely obvious. Finding the “right” solution is a huge investment of time and effort. I’ve been known to arrive in neighborhoods at five in the morning to scout properties that have not been listed on any multiple listing systems, because the landlords simply are not that savvy, but they know enough to put a sign in the window.

At Mohr Partners, this kind of tenacity and attention to detail is our métier finding the best possible solution for our clients, no matter how great a challenge it may be—and when we find a solution, tenants realize it is the best possible solution, while all others are second best.

At the time of this writing, the non-profit featured in this article is still mulling over its options. To find out your options, feel free to contact me!

George Grace

George E. Grace
G.E. Grace & Company, Inc.
232 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
646-312-6800