Lease expiries
Lease expiry tracking: the Monday sweep for brokers
Most brokers looking for their next leasing deal go outward: cold calls, drive-bys, a list bought from somewhere. Meanwhile the highest-probability opportunity they have is sitting in a spreadsheet they already own, with a date on it.
A tenant whose lease ends in fourteen months is going to make a decision. They will renew, expand, contract or move. Every one of those outcomes is a transaction, and in our experience the broker who is in the conversation first usually gets it. The only question is whether you call them in month fourteen or find out in month three that someone else did.
Here is the discipline. You can run it in a spreadsheet before you run it in software.
Step 1: one list, every lease you know about
Not just your own deals. Every lease you have ever seen in your submarket: deals you did, deals you lost, buildings you toured, expiries a landlord mentioned in passing. Six columns is enough: tenant, building, unit, square feet, expiry date, and whether the date is confirmed or estimated.
The estimated ones matter more than brokers expect. “Signed around 2021, probably a five-year term” is a workable lead, as long as it is marked as an estimate so it never gets quoted to anyone as fact. The lease expiry check handles the marking for you and explains what it does with a half-known date.
Step 2: five milestones, not one
The common mistake is a single reminder at ninety days. Tenant advisers recommend starting at least 12 months before expiry, and 18 months or more for larger or more complex moves [1, 2], so by ninety days out the useful conversations have usually happened. The conversation you want happens far earlier, and it is a different conversation each time.
At eighteen months you have nothing to sell, which is the point: you are establishing that you exist before anyone is selling anything. At twelve months you have the real conversation, and it is where deals are won. At nine months a tenant who is moving firms up their requirements, so bring options unasked. At six months the landlord knows time is short and the tenant's leverage is falling, and a renewal-option notice deadline may already have passed [1, 3]. At three months you are either in the deal or finding out who is.
The tool page sets out the milestone table and the rules the sweep follows. What follows here is the part no tool can do for you.
What the twelve-month call actually sounds like
This is the one that matters, and most brokers either skip it or turn it into a pitch. It is neither a cold call nor a proposal. You are the only person telling this tenant something useful a year before they need it.
It runs about six minutes:
- Say why you are calling, precisely. “Your lease at 200 King is up next September. I track expiries in this node, and twelve months is when the useful decisions get made. Nothing to sell you today.” The specificity is what separates you from the list-buyers.
- Ask what the space is doing, not what they want. Headcount, whether they are tripping over each other, whether half the floor is empty on Fridays. You are looking for the gap between the space they signed for and the business they run now.
- Give away one real number. What comparable space in the building or the node has actually transacted at, net, this year. Not a range off a website. This is the moment you become worth taking a call from, and it costs you nothing you cannot say out loud.
- Name the renewal trap. In our experience many tenants think staying is free. Tell them plainly that a renewal negotiated without a credible alternative is priced as though the landlord knows they are not leaving, because the landlord does know [1].
- Agree the next date, then get off the phone. “Let me come back to you in the spring with what the floor below traded at.” Book it. Then hang up before you talk yourself into a pitch.
What you want off that call is not a mandate. It is permission to call again at nine months with something in your hand, and the knowledge of whether this tenant is staying, stretching or leaving.
Step 3: Monday morning, one list
The sweep is worthless if it lives somewhere you do not look. It needs to arrive the same way every week, be short enough to read standing up, and tell you who to call rather than what happened. Five names beats a dashboard.
Step 4: write down what came back
“Renewing, not interested” is as valuable as a live lead, because it removes a name from next quarter’s list and tells you something about that landlord’s terms. Three years of that record and you will know your submarket better than any list you could buy.
What this is worth
A broker tracking two hundred leases on five-year terms sees roughly forty come up a year. Convert one in ten of those twelve-month conversations and it is four extra deals, from a list they already had. The tool page works the arithmetic through.
The spreadsheet version of all this works. It fails on the reminder, because nobody reliably checks a date column every Monday for three years.
Try it on your own list, now
The lease expiry check runs this sweep on a list you paste from your spreadsheet and hands back the twelve-month call calendar. It runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded, and there is no account.
These milestones are the floor for a working sweep. For large or complex requirements the useful window opens earlier, up to 36 months out. For the whole timeline, from blend-and-extend three years out to holdover, and when a client’s decision makes one deal or two, read The Expiry Clock.
If what stops you is the cost of putting this in software, we wrote about what CRE software actually costs when you are the only broker, and about five jobs AI can take off your desk.
Frontage does this sweep automatically. Import the expiry spreadsheet you already keep, and the milestones arrive by email and in a follow-ups queue, each once, with the call logged when you make it. Free for up to 50 leases, and the import reads your headers rather than asking you to re-key anything.
Sources
Checked in September 2026.