Lease expiries
Your next deal is already in your lease book. Here’s the sweep that finds it.
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 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, and 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. Mark it as an estimate so you do not quote it to anyone as fact, but keep it in the sweep.
Step 2: five milestones, not one
The common mistake is a single reminder at ninety days. By ninety days out, a tenant with any sophistication has already engaged someone. The conversation you want happens far earlier, and it is a different conversation each time:
| Months out | The call |
|---|---|
| 18 | Nothing to sell. Ask how the space is working, whether headcount is moving. You are establishing that you exist before anyone is selling anything. |
| 12 | The real one. Renewal economics, what the market has done, whether staying is obviously right. This is where deals are won. |
| 9 | If they are moving, requirements firm up now. Bring two or three options unasked. |
| 6 | Landlord side heats up. If you represent the tenant, leverage is at its peak here. |
| 3 | Either you are in the deal or you are not. Use this one to find out who is. |
Each milestone fires once. A tenant who has renewed, expired or terminated drops out of the sweep entirely. Otherwise you spend your Mondays dismissing reminders for deals that are dead, and within a month you stop reading them at all.
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. Brokers who keep this record for three years end up knowing their submarket better than the data providers do.
What this is actually worth
Take a broker tracking 200 leases on five-year average terms. Roughly 40 come up each year. If the 12-month conversation converts even one in ten into a mandate that would otherwise have gone elsewhere, that is four extra deals a year, from a list they already had.
The spreadsheet version 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. It is the fastest way to find out whether your list is already telling you something.
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.