Landlords WANT to Send You Deals

If you're an expanding tenant, here's a confession from someone who owns shopping centers: landlords and developers want to bring you deals. In many cases, badly. We have the sites, we have the vacancies, and we have plenty of motivation to get the right tenant into the right location. The problem is that most of the time, we're guessing about what you're looking for.

We might know your brand, but we don't necessarily know your current real estate criteria. We don't know whether you're expanding into our market this year, whether you've changed your preferred square footage, or whether you've quietly added a new trade area to your growth plan. Sometimes we'll find out you're expanding into a market six months after it would have been useful to know, which means we've already missed the opportunity to put our property in front of you.

And sometimes, we simply haven't heard of you yet.

Five years ago, I had no idea who Dutch Bros Coffee was. Now they're everywhere. That's not an unusual story in retail. There are constantly new concepts expanding into markets across the country, many of which aren't yet on the radar of the landlords and developers who could provide them with real estate.

From the tenant's perspective, that creates a strange problem. You've already done the hard work of figuring out where you want to grow. You've identified your target markets, determined what kind of sites work for your concept, established your square footage requirements, and presumably built an entire expansion strategy around those decisions. But if the people who control the real estate don't know any of that, they can't help you execute the plan.

That's the entire reason we built Sytes.

Instead of asking tenants to spend their time searching through listings or calling every broker in a market, we let them publish their site criteria once. When a landlord or developer has a property that actually matches those requirements, they can be notified that the tenant is looking for a site like theirs.

A traditional approach often starts with the property and asks, "Who could we convince to take this?" Sytes starts with the tenant's requirements and works in the other direction. The site gets matched against what the tenant actually needs rather than what someone hopes they might accept.

There's another benefit that sounds almost too simple: sometimes the landlord just needs a reminder that you exist.

That’s kind of a major part of marketing, after all. Brands spend enormous amounts of money making sure consumers recognize their name because familiarity influences who gets considered when someone is ready to buy. The same basic principle applies to commercial real estate. If a landlord is reviewing potential tenants for a new development and your brand keeps appearing as an active, qualified tenant in that market, you're much more likely to be part of that conversation.

This is particularly important for growing concepts that haven't yet reached national recognition. You shouldn't have to become a household name before landlords start bringing you opportunities. If you're a serious operator with a real expansion plan, the market should have a way to discover that you're looking.

And that's where I think tenants have more leverage than they realize.

You already know where you want to go. You've already built the market plan. The more clearly you communicate that plan to the people who control the real estate, the more likely the right properties are going to find their way to you.

At the end of the day, better information makes everyone easier to work with. Landlords know what you're looking for, developers know where you want to build, and you spend less time sorting through sites that were never going to work in the first place.

If you want better sites, make it easier for the people who have them to find you.