How to Make Your Leasing Meetings More Strategic and Productive with VTS

How to make your leasing meetings more strategic and productive with VTS
Thought Leadership
  • 28 Mar 2024 · 8 MIN READ

    Spring ‘24 Tenant Experience Trends and Forecasting What’s Ahead

    Read more
  • 27 Mar 2024 · 6 MIN READ

    A Tale of Two Cities: London and NYC Office...

    Read more

How to Make Your Leasing Meetings More Strategic and Productive with VTS

Nick Romito
Nick Romito
CEO, VTS

The leasing meeting is a critical part of the commercial lease management process, providing a forum for asset managers, leasing teams, and brokers to collaborate around deals in the pipeline and determine how best to move them forward. But the way today’s typical leasing meetings are run is fundamentally broken, and the majority of leasing and asset management teams I come across are missing a huge opportunity to make this time more productive. The fundamental piece that transforms these meetings into agile and proactive sessions? Technology.

The leasing meeting of today

Does this sound familiar? You walk into the office, coffee in hand, dreading the next 60-90 minutes of staring at pages of printed-out spreadsheets, where the deal update is typically “left VM” or “will follow up.” You and your team go through each deal on the list and provide updates based on information that's anywhere from a few days to a few weeks old. After reviewing each line on the spreadsheet, everyone agrees they need to “push harder” on all the deals on the list.

We’ve all sat through these — they’re inefficient and unproductive, to say the least. We actually filmed a short video for our user conference VTS Accelerate to highlight exactly how ineffective they really are.

Watch the video below:

Let’s walk through five ways you can use VTS to transform your leasing meetings into collaborative sessions that actually move the needle.

1. Turn deal updates into strategic conversations

Imagine if the “updates” core to the leasing meeting had already been given by the time your team got together. With all of your team collaborating on VTS, this is now the reality. The VTS mobile app allows teams to enter deal updates, terms, and tenant information immediately after a tour or speaking with a tenant, as opposed to when they’re back at their desks. Senior leasing and asset managers have access to this information as it's entered, are alerted when they need to act, and can make decisions more rapidly.

The result? More time for strategic conversations about each deal and building in the leasing activity meeting. Rather than staring at a static printout of a spreadsheet, put VTS up on the screen for an agile discussion on the status of all leasing activity, tenant demand, and market conditions. Making these updates while the deals are up on the screen puts everyone’s fingerprints on the gun.

2. Use the VTS Stacking and Site Plans to see the full picture

The leasing meeting is the perfect time for brokers and landlords to collaborate in real-time to find the right space for tenants and the right tenant mix for the asset. Do you have a tenant that’s outgrowing their current space or the space they’re looking at isn’t quite right? Pull up the VTS stacking or site plan on the spot to instantly understand availability across a building or portfolio and see where that tenant could be better suited.

VTS Stacking Plans are always the most up-to-date place for space information (they’re connected directly to your accounting system) — this means you’re able to surface opportunities in the asset that might not be so obvious. For example, you can easily see which tenants have renewal rights, termination rights, or any option that could open up space in the building. Additionally, by using the filters you can identify which spaces aren’t seeing nearly enough activity and think through new strategies. The Stacking Plan is a goldmine of data when thinking through leasing strategies and should be pulled up in every leasing meeting.

3. Use historical data to find relationships

We all know that relationships are a critical part of the process but our industry does a terrible job of using them to move deals forward or identify opportunities. We’ve fixed that. During your meeting, pull up VTS TRM (Tenant Relationship Management). TRM is the only customer relationship management (CRM) product in commercial real estate that can give you a single view of your tenant base and relationships across every asset or partner regardless of the accounting system (MRI, Yardi, JDE, homegrown, etc.) This allows you to look across every deal in the pipeline to see the following:

  • Have they ever been a tenant of yours, anywhere?
  • Have they ever been in the pipeline? What happened with that deal?
  • Are they a subsidiary of any companies you have an existing relationship with?
  • Who in your company has the best relationship, and is there an account owner?
  • If they're an existing tenant, are they happy?

33% of all relationships are now facilitated online — this is your opportunity to follow suit.

4. Act on decisions in real time

Don’t lose any time following up on the opportunities your team identifies in real time. We all carry a smartphone with us wherever we go — imagine your team putting their devices to use in your next session. With VTS, you can kick off the conversation with a tenant immediately, as opposed to days later when you get to your to-do list. Fire off floor plans, space information, photos, and marketing brochures directly from VTS while still in the meeting.

5. Have proactive conversations about how to optimize portfolio-wide efficiency

With VTS, you can see your conversion rates at every stage of your deal cycle, by building. That is, what percentage of your tours are converting to proposals, proposals to leases out, and leases out to leases executed?

Use your leasing meetings to have strategic conversations about this data and why certain buildings are experiencing lower conversion rates than others. You can ask questions like:

  • Which industries is our tenant demand coming from? Does our marketing messaging resonate with this group?
  • What space sizes and conditions are prospects looking for? Are we providing this?
  • What is the tour experience like in the building?
  • Are our brokers performing and following up quickly?
  • Are there bottlenecks in our approvals process?

With this insight you can focus on fixing issues, fine-tuning your team’s efforts, and increasing efficiency at each stage and across different buildings — ultimately leading to faster deal cycles and reduced downtime.

As a society, we rely on technology now more than ever before. So, why are so many leasing meetings centered around a static spreadsheet? With technology like VTS, you can transform these meetings from inefficient and unproductive to strategic and tactical (and a lot more fun). Now stop reading and go do some deals!

Ready for more? Our Guide to Running a Productive Leasing Meeting will walk you, step-by-step, through how to use VTS to run a more productive, efficient, and collaborative leasing meeting! Read now.

Nick Romito
Nick Romito
Nick Romito is the CEO of VTS.

Interested in learning more about the VTS Platform?

Request a Demo
subscribe-img
ic-vts-white-logo
VTS Resources
Happy Clients
Customer Success Stories

Hear the most proactive, forward-thinking executives who use commercial real estate software to increase their ROI speak about their partnership with VTS.

cs-img
Product
Platform Innovations

See what's new and improved for customers across the VTS Platform.

Who we are
About Us

Learn about the VTS mission and the change we’re here to create.

We’d Love to Hear From You

Sales & Support

Looking for a specific office?

Visit our Contact Us page

Please Fill out the Form Below

Lorem ipsum filler text secondary line for more description

Sign up for a Free Demo

Thank you for your demo request.

We’ll be in touch with you shortly.
In the meantime, take a peek at our customer stories.

Learn how best-in-class firms accelerated their portfolios with VTS
Learn more