Tenants should approach early occupancy with situational awareness and caution. Relying on early occupancy in a lease can prove challenging in certain scenarios.

Site selection involves evaluating on-site and off-site factors of properties under consideration. This post discusses four key concepts in site selection, common on-site and off-site factors for distribution, and common on-site and off-site factors for manufacturing uses.

Companies who are indecisive about leasing or purchasing an industrial property are often still in the exploratory phase of site selection. They have not obtained internal alignment on the project and are not ready to actively pursue available options. Therefore, their tire kicking is often a symptom that the company has not completed a prior required step in the site selection process, not that they are pre-disposed to being indecisive or unaccepting of anything less than perfection.

With such a lack of available and vacant space to choose from, companies should pay particular attention to how they are negotiating possession and lease commencement in new lease agreements and how they are communicating with their current landlord if there is a possibility of holdover.

Finding available infill properties for land-intensive industrial occupiers is typically much more challenging than office, warehouse or manufacturing uses. Due to these challenges, site selection for land-intensive industrial occupiers must be designed differently to increase the odds of success.

Important information should always be verified, even if from reliable sources. Companies must prioritize the information they verify in industrial real estate projects.

The blend and extend lease renewal can be an advantageous transaction for both the Landlord and Tenant in markets favorable to the landlord or tenant. In either case, it is important for each party to quantify the positive and negative aspects of a proposed blend and extend transaction, especially its financial impact to each respective organization.

The value a company assigns to a property on its financial statements can impact whether the sale of said property will align with company objectives

In many ways insurance is an unsung hero in industrial real estate. It allows interested parties to insure themselves and other parties. Without it, the financial risks associated with the ownership of and operation within industrial real estate would be discouraging, if not disqualifying, to prospective industrial property owners and occupiers.

Starting rental rates are the most used financial metric in commercial real estate. Explore their significance in this post.

I will discuss some of the reasons why options to terminate are desirable, their common types and structures, and analyze their use in commercial real estate transactions. Lease termination options can be negotiated into some lease agreements under certain conditions. Perhaps more than any other option right, in order to successfully negotiate a lease termination option to terminate the party desiring the right must have an awareness of the negative implications for the other party, and a willingness to provide reasonable solutions to address those implications if required.

This post reviews why lease term matters in commercial real estate leases and how variance in lease term will impact common real estate metrics.

There is an art in negotiating a lease in the best interests of your company or customer. As commercial real estate professionals, in order to create great work, we need to be armed with the right tools to understand the operational and financial aspects of the agreements to which we are binding our company or customer.

Since risk is the probability of a negative result, evaluating and reducing risk is the way to reach the most important objectives in industrial real estate transactions. In general, a mindset which prioritizes risk avoidance is one that maintains company purpose, relationships, and leads to the best results overall.

If you were to choose the most important objective of any industrial real estate transaction, what would it be? Spectacular savings compared to market? Getting acceptance on all the important legal terms? Above market tenant improvement allowance? Operations is happy with the property condition? On-time occupancy?

Corporate real estate has developed distinct service categories to meet the real estate needs of business units and organize talent by skill sets. These services often work closely with each other. Portfolio administration continuously interacts with transaction management, facilities management and legal. Facilities management can frequently work with project management and space planning, or assume their functions within the facilities management department.

The selection and hiring of a market broker to represent a client as a fiduciary is one of the most significant responsibilities of a corporate real estate account manager. A market broker is typically an expert in a given geographic market or vertical, such as cold storage or truck terminals, while the corporate real estate account manager oversees the overall real estate services to the client.

One of the main areas I recommend industrial occupiers pay close attention to in lease negotiations are the responsibilities of who maintains, repairs, and replaces building systems and components under a lease.

The selection, construction, and use of transaction documents is an important part of negotiating any commercial real estate transaction. Transaction documents define the parties to the transaction, the business terms to be agreed upon, and the time frame in which the parties can agree. They create the playing field for the negotiation to take place.