Office lease negotiations are complex, and tenants who lack strong representation are often at a serious disadvantage—they don’t know what they don’t know. One key area where this shows up is the tenant improvement allowance (TIA).
TenantSee Weekly: Subleasing Office Space - What Tenants Need to Know
TenantSee Weekly: The Exclusive Right to Represent
At TenantSee, we only advise clients under a formal working agreement that clearly outlines our role as the exclusive representative, the scope of services, and how we are compensated. It’s a short, straightforward document—but a vital one. It establishes our fiduciary duty and marks the official beginning of our advisory relationship.
TenantSee Weekly: The Long Shadow
When companies select a real estate advisor, one crucial yet often overlooked factor is the advisor’s credibility with landlords. It’s understandable why this isn't top of mind — credibility is difficult to measure. But it can be among the most valuable assets your advisor brings to the table. Let's break down what "credibility with the landlord" means and why it matters.
TenantSee Weekly: Is ChatGPT Better Than You (Me)?
If you’re a business professional—accountant, lawyer, engineer, or even (gulp) an office broker—you’ve probably wondered: Can AI do my job better than me?
As a broker who advises office tenants, I tested ChatGPT in a domain I know well. I asked it for average Class A office rents in downtown San Francisco over the last 30 years, including supply and demand dynamics. In less than a minute, it delivered a surprisingly accurate answer.
TenantSee Weekly: What Tenants See Impacts Tenancy
Most of what tenants need to see in order to make smart leasing decisions is not immediately visible. It must be uncovered through strategic discovery and analysis. That’s the mission of TenantSee: to provide the process and resources that bring hidden factors to light. We don’t make decisions for our clients—we make their decisions better.
TenantSee Weekly: What Really Matters
In the business of advising office tenants on leasing space, services are provided by a wide range of firms—from solo practitioners to global public companies with thousands of employees. As in any competitive industry, each firm tries to differentiate itself by highlighting its strengths while casting doubt on the competition.
TenantSee Weekly: AirOffice
For many companies, office space is among a variety of resources they make available to employees to help facilitate work. Other primary resources include technology. In fact, today, technology arguably contributes more to how work is done than the physical office. The diminished role of the office in facilitating work has resulted in changes in how companies look to use office space. One manifestation of this change is in flexible offices, or coworking spaces. This product segment, having grown considerably over the past decade, is tangible proof of shifting consumer sentiment.
TenantSee Weekly: When the Landlord Isn't (the Value of Options)
We’ve written a lot over the past few years about the capital stack, the equity and debt structures that commonly define ownership of office assets. We’ve talked about “broken” capital stacks, situations in which the original equity is wiped out and some portion of the debt may also be under water. We’ve noted it’s very challenging to transact in these assets because the financial partners would need to invest more capital on transactions that would generate negative returns. In other words, good money after bad.
TenantSee Weekly: What's Missing
Negotiating office leases is like any other complex financial decision in that more information leads to better decisions. Yet companies face challenges acquiring the right information at the right time. Why? Because the services typically offered by real estate brokerages are centered on transacting based on site selection and the negotiation of basic rental economics. This is not enough. Sometimes, these services (at least) include a level of multi-building negotiation, exercising a degree of leverage, but too often they lack the proper structure to gather and assess critical data, data that will have a big impact on outcome.
TenantSee Weekly: What Will We Do?
TenantSee Weekly: No Free Lunch
The office product offering is shifting to provide an array of hospitality-inspired experiences that, in some cases, rival those of a 5-Star hotel. San Francisco landlords have lagged other markets in providing such high-end amenities because in the 2 decades prior to the pandemic, the supply/demand dynamic favored landlords, making it easier to lease space (e.g., they didn’t have to). For the past several years, however, San Francisco landlords have begun to spend millions on targeted amenities. The typical playbook calls for some combination of health/fitness, conferencing and events, club/lounge/bar spaces, and specialty spaces, like golf simulator rooms and podcasting studios.
TenantSee Weekly: What Do You See?
TenantSee Weekly: How Investor Exit Options Affect the San Francisco Office Market
TenantSee Weekly: What's the Rate
If you look at the quarterly market reports provided by all major real estate service firms (Cushman & Wakefield, included), you will find that rent data is typically expressed in terms of “Asking Rents”. Reports will cite the trend in Average Asking Rents by submarket, or by building class. This is a somewhat misleading indicator. Why? Because it does not reflect the rent after negotiations, which often includes reductions in rate from the Asking Rate and potentially significant landlord-funded concessions. In other words, Asking Rents reflect what landlords are asking, not what they’re getting.
TenantSee Weekly: A Good Desk
TenantSee Weekly: In a Vaccum
Office leases are complicated undertakings comprised of many variables. The markets offer a variety of solutions, ranging from coworking to subleases to long and short-term direct leases. It’s always important for corporate leaders to understand the primary objectives they seek to achieve in leasing office space. But even when these objectives are well defined, it can be tricky to assess which solution is best.
TenantSee Weekly: Taxis and the Offices
Technology replaces that which it improves.
Not long ago, the streets of San Francisco were full of taxis. Simply by raising your arm, you could hail a taxi in minutes. Then, Uber and Lyft created their apps. Their intention was always to disrupt an industry that hadn’t changed in decades. Initially, many taxi drivers transitioned to become Uber and Lyft drivers, likely anticipating the technology would shift, not replace their work. But that’s not how this is turning out. Autonomous vehicles will replace human-driven, human transport solutions in major cities where taxi drivers once thrived.
TenantSee Weekly: Disbributed (but only a little)
Surveys indicate most workers favor a distributed workplace in which they can work from anywhere, any time. When it comes to work, individuals focus (mostly) on their own specific benefits, as opposed to thinking about how the ways in which their work gets done affects the broader organization. This makes sense, as one of the key benefits of our economic system is how it permits the individual to get ahead, to maximize its value. Employees realize value in a variety of ways, including compensation and other variables. Flexibility in where and when people work is high on the list of non-compensation related variables.
TenantSee Weekly: Planning for the Future, not the Moment
Urban planning can go horribly wrong. It often fails the test of time. 1950s America brought a surge in suburban development and car transportation. It also led to one of the single worst American urban design decisions (my opinion), the development of the Embarcadero Freeway, originally intended to connect the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge by extending along the northeastern edge of the city as it hugs the bay -- effectively blocking the views along one of the most scenic corridors in any US city.