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When touring available spaces, you will be faced with everything from the never-occupied, new space to the dowdiest, chopped up, rat maze space.  It is difficult at best to envision your future location in the very same spot now occupied by an out of business stock brokerage firm with hundreds of small partitioned offices.  Likewise, it is fanciful to envision your new image in a space now resembling a cave, with no improvements, ceiling, HVAC, or walls; just gray, dusty, concrete floor as far as the eye can see.  When touring these buildings, do not prejudge anything good or bad.  It will be up to the architect to marry your needs assessment and criteria with each building (programming), and evaluate the existing conditions (and value) of improvements, and evaluate each building’s technical data.  The tour is to give you a general sense of the building, the image, the view to and from the building, location, access, and how you might envision your company occupying space these.  This sense and the process of programming, technical data and improvement allowance evaluation will provide you with some elements to determine if the building is “qualified” or is simply a “prospect”. As each building clears certain evaluations they become “finalists”.

When being toured by the enthusiastic leasing agent or building owner you will be faced with a fire hose of information.  Building owners and listing agents are proud of their buildings and they energetically espouse all the specific benefits of each detail.  You will hear the importance of the recessed sprinkler-head escutcheons, variable air volume HVAC, full height solid core hard wood doors, different ceiling heights, different ceiling grids, different ceiling pads, door hardware, window sill height, etc. In touring several large buildings, it was actually funny how in one building the agent showed unbridled enthusiasm about the building’s thermostatically controlled HVAC zone areas.  Five grown men and women in suits, for five minutes listening about vacuum driven HVAC boxes in the plenum.  At another building, the seasoned building developer walked five feet into the space, waived his arm out as if to show us in and said, “How about that view? You need to be looking over this view for the next ten years.”  Rarely did he touch on specifications of the building.  He was clear that there will be a time for that among the technical professionals, but today was for the sizzle.  And by mentioning a ten year lease, actually started the negotiations right there. Do not commit to memory the floor weight capacities or one-inch mini blinds.  Further, do not be put off or limited by the pre-existing improvements of the past tenant. It will be up to your professional team to determine the usability of any of that and as compared to the landlord’s improvement allowance.  And, if needed, in one week the rat maze can be cleared out to the shell to start over.  Just enjoy the tours. Afterward, you can declare which building fits your criteria of image. Your team will determine which is compatible with your criteria and which then drops on to the qualified list.

During the tour, you will also be asked many questions about your plans, your office layout, lease expiration, detail after detail. Remember that if you have properly performed the needs assessment and criteria, your team leader and architect will be qualifying the building.  It is unnecessary to reveal all of your information at the tour, there is time enough for that later. The best bet is to not talk about anything other than the building you are touring.

Using this “prospect”, “qualified” and “finalist” framework throughout your process will give you the permission to tell a building owner or agent that their building has been “disqualified” if they do not meet the terms you set for them.  Sometimes just a negotiation ploy to get a landlord to agree, but having the predetermined permission to disqualify a building is powerful stuff.  It provides you with leverage to outline what terms or conditions would return the building to a “qualified” or “finalist” stage.  If you want to see angina in action, just tell a building owner that has just said no to your request for three more months free rent or more construction dollars that their building has been disqualified.  You will likely get a call back from their bank saying, “Well, that would be just fine.”