Armando Lanuti, President of Creative Works, discusses why hiring your own commercial real estate broker is much better for you when searching for properties.
Welcome to another 360 Insights video; where we share actionable tips for those in the entertainment industry. What I want to talk about today is leasing space. A lot of times people will make a mistake in just calling up the number they see on the side of a building or maybe they found through a resource such as LoopNet, and then making inquires. Unfortunately, what this sets you up for is talking to the broker for the landlord, who has the landlord’s best interest at heart. The first thing that you should do is try to find your own real estate broker. They don’t cost you any money; they get paid when the deal is done, so there’s no upfront costs you need to worry about. Instead, they are worried about your best interests and keeping your goals in mind opposed to the landlord’s.
There are a lot of intangible benefits that you’re going to get out of that scenario. Some of those are going to include the fact that they know the area; that can mean that they know of other properties that haven’t been listed yet that will become available in the near future that would be better suited for your project. Another big thing that they might be able to share with you is the property history. Knowing what the property was a couple of years ago or a couple of tenants ago can be very important. You don’t want to find out you’re putting in an entertainment center for kids in the former home of a bar or strip club—it’s happened before and it didn’t work out very well for that client.
Other things that are very important are things that you’re going to have to educate them about. Your typical real estate broker is used to selling and leasing spaces that are for offices or retail. You an entertainment center, you might have specific needs, such as ceiling height, that are going to be important and unique to your business; things such as needing 18-feet clear for laser tag or 20-22-feet clear for trampolines or inflatables might be something out of the norm for most brokers.
We hope this helps, use these tips the best you can and we look forward to talking to you next time. Now get after it!