The Art of Retail Negotiation: Strategies for National Tenant Deals

How do you approach requests from a national tenant that can hurt your property value? What do retail landlords care more about? How do you balance TI with free rent and how much to give of each? Bethany Babcock, Founder and Principal at Foresite Commercial Real Estate shares her insights.

Read this entire interview here: http://tinyurl.com/mryukh4j

There's a lot of pushbacks that we need to give tenants, how do you approach that because when you're talking to a national tenant, they have a lot of the upper hand.

I like to explain to them how it impacts the value of the property, because sometimes, especially if it's a national tenant, they're working from a real estate department, they've never had to think about it from a landlord's perspective. I like to show them how it's going to impact the landlord, and how do you propose we solve that? And put the burden back on them to come up with the solution. Once they understand that what they're asking for is a $100,000 ask, but they feel like it's a $10,000 ask, they start to weight their priorities a little bit differently because their goal is to get a deal done. Putting the weight back on them to be able to come up with solutions is important, some of these things are more important than others.

Vague or generous assignment language: tenants are priced based on their risk in retail, and so, when you have a tenant that can assign their lease to another guarantor, if it's not clear that the guarantor is of equal or greater strength, it can impact the value of the building. That's been happening a lot. You see that in single-tenant properties where a large operator will set up all of these locations, guarantee the lease, but have the ability to assign the lease to another operator. And so, someone will buy it at a lower cap rate with this really strong credit and then later have it assigned to a tenant with a lower credit, that's an immediate reduction on the value of the building. Tenants need to know what they're asking for and understand that their credit is the value of that building.

Retail landlords care more about the use more than they do about the rent: brokers will sometimes get frustrated when the first question the landlord asks, or the landlord rep asks is, what use? And they'll think, just tell me the price! No, it depends on what use, they want to know who are they, and how many locations they have, you can't just say I can't disclose. It wastes everyone's time because there might be an exclusive that prevents that use from being at that property. And that might keep them from doing a lease or waste everyone's time, but also, they might not like the use, or it might not fit with the overall feel of the center. There's a lot more psychology that goes into leasing out a shopping center than leasing an office building, for example.

Not every landlord wants the longest lease term possible: Brokers are very much incentivized to do a very long-term lease and sometimes the landlord doesn't want that, and sometimes the tenant doesn't either, so it's important to make sure that everyone's asking the right questions. A landlord is assumed to want the longest lease term possible and that's not always the case. One of the reasons is because they might want to stagger the expirations so that you don't have more than 30% rolling over in a year. Or sometimes the conditions might throw off the deal and that's one way to get it back on track by shortening it a little bit, or they might have a different long-term plan for the property.

Bethany Babcock

www.foresitecre.com

www.twitter.com/bethanyjbabcock