The Ingredients Matter

Strategy is to occupier real estate what a recipe is to a great meal.  A recipe is more than the sum of its parts.  It’s about how each ingredient is prepared, how and when it’s added to the mix.  As with any recipe in which there are primary ingredients, vital to its success, similarly, every great strategy requires 3 main parts:
 

• Experience

• Resources

• Market Knowledge

 
On the surface, experience should be easy to understand.  However, it’s not just a matter of time in the industry, it’s also about the exact type of work and how that work contributes to the success in projects like yours.  Concentrated specialization in tenant advisory is essential.  Office occupiers need professionals who are experienced in the very specific challenges of creating and exercising leverage in complex office markets.  This is not a skillset your average commercial broker will possess.
 
But even the right experience, by itself, is not enough.  Great strategy also requires resources.  By way of example, our tenant advisory practice is significantly enhanced through our ability to draw from a wide spectrum of resources available to us at Cushman & Wakefield, a global firm.  These include things like our culture of sharing best practices from the global work we do.  It’s the huge investment our firm makes in market research, which helps inform our strategies.  It’s having access to data and insights we derive from other disciplines within our firm, like our capital markets practice, which provides us vital knowledge about equity, debt, and landlord motivations.
 
Real market knowledge, the kind that runs deep and wide, can only be obtained when there is a high level of engagement in the markets.  In all major markets, Cushman & Wakefield maintains a strong presence across multiple strategic disciplines, the cumulative effect of which is a much better view of both the big and small pictures.  And make no mistake, we need to be able to pan in and out to see how all the pieces fit together.
 
Experience, resources, and market knowledge, these are the 3 main ingredients to a good tenant advisory strategy, the ingredients that matter.