The tenant representation process is how an occupier-side broker takes a business from a rough sense that it needs space to a signed lease on terms it can live with for the next five or ten years. It runs in the opposite direction to a listing. You start from a requirement, not a building, and every step after that narrows the field. What follows is a walk through the tenant representation process the way it actually runs on an engagement, stage by stage, with a note at each point on why it matters and what a clean record of it looks like. REPM models each of these stages as its own record, so the thread from brief to signature never leaves one place.
What is tenant representation?
Tenant representation, often shortened to tenant rep, is commercial real estate advisory work done for the tenant rather than the landlord. A tenant rep broker finds and secures space for an occupier, runs the market on their behalf, and negotiates the deal. In most markets the broker is paid by the landlord out of the transaction. So the short answer to what is tenant representation: the occupier gets an expert on their side of the table, usually at no direct cost, because the commission comes from the other side of the deal.
Because the engagement starts from a demand rather than a property, it does not fit a listing-shaped CRM. That mismatch is why a small set of purpose-built tools exists, which we cover in the tenant rep software comparison. This piece is about the process itself.
Step one: needs analysis and the brief
The engagement opens with questions, not floor plans. How many people work here today, and how many in three years on the current hiring plan? How much of the week is the office actually occupied once hybrid patterns are honest rather than aspirational? What is the real estate budget, and how strong is the covenant, the company's credit profile that a landlord will underwrite? When does the current lease expire, and how much runway is there before a holdover or a rushed deal becomes the only option? The answers become the brief. Get the growth and timing assumptions wrong here and every later stage inherits the error.
Step two: from brief to a space requirement
The brief is a conversation. The requirement is a specification. Turning one into the other means committing to a target: which submarkets, how much area in a defensible range rather than a single number, what building quality and amenity level, what lease term, and the must-haves that a space either has or does not. Parking ratios, power and cooling for a lab or a trading floor, loading access, an occupancy date that lines up with the lease expiry. In REPM this requirement is the anchor record. It carries its own demand-side pipeline, brief through survey, touring, RFP, negotiation, LOI and execution, so the requirement is the thing that moves through stages rather than a note stapled to a contact.
Step three: the market survey
With a requirement set, the broker surveys the market. The work that earns the fee here is curation. A good survey covers on-market space and off-market options the broker knows about through relationships and recent deals, then filters hard against the requirement so the client sees a shortlist worth their time rather than a database dump. Each candidate space is a real option with its asking terms, its floor size, its condition and its fit against the must-haves. The survey is versioned, because the market moves and new space appears while stale space drops off, and the client should always see the current cut with the history preserved.
Step four: tours and evaluation
Shortlist in hand, the client tours. The discipline that separates a professional engagement from a few property viewings is standardized evaluation. Every option is scored against the same criteria, and the client's reaction is captured per stop while it is fresh, favorite, interested, or pass, not reconstructed from memory a week later. Tour stops carry a sequence and the client's comments, so by the end there is a ranked, annotated field rather than a blur of lobbies. That record is what makes the next stage, going to landlords, a focused exercise instead of a fishing trip.
Step five: the RFP to multiple landlords
For the options that survive the tours, the broker issues a request for proposal to each landlord. Sending the RFP to several landlords at once is the point, not a formality. Competition is the tenant's main source of leverage, and a landlord who knows the occupier is looking at three other buildings sharpens their pencil in a way that a single-track negotiation never produces. The RFP sets out the requirement in terms a landlord can price against, and it invites them to put their best economics on the table.
Step six: proposal comparison on net effective rent
This is the stage where the tenant representation process earns its keep, and where a raw rent number lies. Two offers with the same face rent can be worlds apart once you account for everything around it. Proposals differ on:
- Base rent and how it escalates each year, a flat step or an index clause.
- Service charge or operating expenses, and whether they are capped or open-ended.
- Tenant improvement or fit-out allowance, the landlord's contribution to building out the space.
- Free rent and other incentives, the rent-free months or contributions that soften the early years.
- Lease term, because a longer commitment changes what every other line is worth.
To compare offers honestly you normalize all of that to a single figure, the net effective rent: the average cost per unit of area per year across the whole term once incentives, allowances and escalations are spread out. A headline rent that looks cheaper on paper can be the more expensive deal once a thin fit-out allowance and a weak free-rent package are priced in. In REPM each space option normalizes these components and carries its net effective rent, so best-and-final rounds compare like for like instead of on the prettiest headline.
Step seven: negotiation and the letter of intent
Armed with a normalized comparison, the broker negotiates. Rounds run against the leading options in parallel for as long as competition is useful, with each landlord aware that the deal is not yet theirs. When one option pulls ahead on total value and fit, the terms go into a letter of intent, the LOI, a non-binding summary of the commercial deal that the lawyers turn into a lease. The LOI is where the hard-won points from the comparison, the free rent, the allowance, the break option, get written down before they can quietly evaporate in the long-form document.
A note on stacking plans
On multi-floor requirements, especially in larger buildings, a stacking plan sits alongside the negotiation. A stacking plan is simply the picture of who occupies which floor of a building, tenant by tenant and floor by floor. It tells you which contiguous blocks are genuinely available, when neighbouring leases roll, and whether expansion space sits above or below the floor on offer. For an occupier that expects to grow, a stacking plan turns a single-floor decision into a multi-year one.
Step eight: lease execution
The lawyers redline the lease against the LOI, the last points close, and the parties sign. For the occupier this is the finish line of the search. For the record it should be a beginning, because the deal that was just signed is now a live lease with critical dates: the rent commencement, the free-rent burn-off, the break option notice window, the expiry that starts the next cycle. In REPM the winning option carries its economics straight into an occupier lease, term, breaks, free rent, tenant improvement, rent commencement, so critical-date tracking starts on day one rather than being re-keyed into a separate system after the champagne.
Step nine: commission, and why the tenant pays nothing directly
Now the economics of the representation itself. In most markets the landlord pays the tenant rep's commission out of the transaction, which is why an occupier can have expert representation at no direct cost. The gross commission is a rate applied to a basis, often the total or net rent over the term. From there it usually splits: a co-broke share if another firm was involved on the tenant side, and a house split between the broker who ran the deal and the firm. Commission also tends to arrive in tranches rather than a single payment, commonly part on lease execution and part on occupancy or rent commencement. Tracking gross, the splits down to net-to-firm, and the tranches with their invoice status is its own piece of work. REPM models the commission as a record that holds the basis, the rate, the co-broke and house splits, and the execution and occupancy tranches, rather than a formula in a side spreadsheet.
The whole chain on one record
Run end to end, the tenant representation process is a single thread: a requirement, a curated survey with the client's verdict on each option, a proposal comparison decided on net effective rent, a negotiation and LOI, the resulting occupier lease, and a landlord-paid commission with its splits. REPM keeps that entire chain on one record, in English and German, in the firm's own Microsoft Dataverse tenant, so nothing is retyped between a survey tool, a spreadsheet and a lease system as the deal moves. You can see how that maps to the product on the tenant representation page.
Related reading: tenant rep software versus a landlord CRM, on why the demand-side workflow needs a different shape of system than the tools built for marketing space.