Professional Styling Key to Office Leasing Post-Covid

Covid has made an already difficult commercial leasing market even more challenging, injecting an unhealthy dose of caution into conversations laden with uncertainty.

In this commercial tenants’ world, there are a few strategies that can help property owners increase the number of inquiries and inspections and help them find tenants in a shorter timeframe.

Money and lease terms matter

As CBD offices continue to empty, more medium to large businesses are starting to experiment with alternative work approaches—not only as a backup solution any more, but as a viable long-term option.

Work-from-home, hot-desking and meeting room hire for important face-to-face meetings are all popular in this Covid-impacted business era, even as things start to go back to normal.

So, what can you do against this grain of change?

Go with it: return to the books and identify the current value of your site against the potential loss of decreasing your rents— flexible rental terms may get you over the line.

If you have little room to move when it comes to pricing, have a look at your lease terms.

After a year as economically unstable as 2020 has been, it might be hard to find tenants ready to commit to a space for more than two years, as they will want to ensure they can scale their business as results demand, or move to a different locale if they cannot sustain internal staff or if their situation was to rapidly change.

Help prospective tenants see a scalable site: simplify move-in

While commercial property owners continue to grapple with harsh realities, a growing trend suggests speculative tenants connect better with pre-designed spaces and demonstrative fit-outs, making property styling the potential key differentiator between an empty space and a leased one.

Traditionally associated to residential spaces, styled spaces have been proven to significantly increase the number of enquiries and inspections to come through compared to empty properties.

Very few people can comfortably envision the potential of an empty space, and even less can confidently plan a functional office layout.

Factoring in future growth while using the space to its best advantage often stumps speculative tenants.

Working with a professional stylist to create the ideal commercial flow and highlight your properties key features will help your tenants envision where and how they’ll be working every day—it can set your space apart and give it an identity at a minimal cost.

And should your eventual tenants want to minimise the headache of moving and be willing to keep the furniture, property styling agreements can often be carried over into commercial furniture hire plans.

Property styling vs CGI

In the real-estate world, great photography is an essential online medium and can be a game-changer in terms of lead generation, ensuring you achieve a solid first impression on social media such as Instagram and LinkedIn as well as email marketing and real estate listing websites.

So far, a lot of property owners and agents have been relying on CGI to bring life to their space, as it often seems quicker and cheaper.

However, if CGI is useful when it comes to online listings, it does have clear limitations when you move from the online promotion to the real-world inspections.

Photography will only take you so far and your tenants will want to see the space for themselves.

Entering an empty office when you’ve been seeing great, lively pictures can be a real let-down and might undo all your previous hard work.

Office styling offers that continuity at every step of the sales funnel, making sure that you show the best of your properties on every channel up until that contract is signed.

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