Consulting vs. Brokering

The lease expires in 24 months. You've been in the space five years. Everyone likes it. The working assumption is you'll extend when the time comes. Nothing to think about just yet.

Or is there?

One of the persistent challenges in my business is breaking through institutionalized and misinformed assumptions about the office lease. Markets have trained companies to treat the lease as fixed: something you address when the term ends, or when some external force demands it, an expansion, a contraction, or a crisis. Broker relationships tend to be structured the same way. Communication picks up near expiration, when it's time to transact. You can forgive leaders for writing off the entire brokerage business as transactional, given the volume of emails and calls that materialize the moment a lease date appears on someone's radar.

The problem is what you're not seeing in the meantime.

During the final 36 months of a lease, three things deserve ongoing attention: how the space is actually serving the company, what the market is doing, and what's happening inside the building. This is the window where opportunities are routinely missed, not through negligence, but through a lack of structured awareness.

The use case question is fundamental. Is the space still working? Has headcount, work model, or collaboration behavior shifted enough to warrant a different footprint? If the bias is to stay, what changes would make staying the right answer?

The market question is equally important, and often counterintuitive. In-place economics that look favorable today can look very different in 24 months if rents are trending upward. When the intent is to renew, moving early to lock in current market terms can be a meaningful financial decision, avoiding as it does the cost of a spiking market.

And the building dynamic matters in ways that aren't always visible from the outside. A landlord managing a vacancy problem or a maturing loan has a different calculus than one operating from a position of strength. A tenant willing to extend early, adding weighted average lease term to the rent roll, may find the landlord unusually motivated to structure a deal that reflects that value. These moments don't announce themselves. They require someone who is paying attention.

The discipline to operate this way is not the norm. It is fundamentally at odds with a business model built around transaction volume. Brokers whose business centers on transacting have limited incentive to initiate conversations that may conclude with "not yet" or "nothing to do here." But there is a subset of tenant advisors who work differently. Consultative by nature, they stay in the conversation between transactions. Their clients don't think of them as brokers in the transactional sense. They think of them as advisors who happen to execute leases when the moment is right.

This is the layer of advisory where strategic opportunity lives.  It’s the difference between consulting and brokering.