What Does Your Property Offer That Others Don’t?
Here’s an exercise almost no landlord has actually done: tour your own competition.
Not pull the comps on CoStar. Physically walk the three or four spaces your prospective tenant is going to tour the same week they tour yours. Stand in them. Notice what you feel. Because your tenant will - and they’ll make a six-figure, five-year decision based largely on that feeling.
Most owners price their property against the market but never position it against the market. Those are two different jobs, and the second one is where deals are won.
Step 1: Walk the competition like a tenant
Pick the spaces competing for your tenant and tour them honestly. For each one, write down three things:
- What’s the first thing you feel walking in?
- What would a tenant have to spend to make this work?
- What does this space have that mine doesn’t - and vice versa?
You’re not looking for reasons to feel good. You’re looking for the truth of the choice your tenant is facing. Half the time, owners discover their “competitive rate” is attached to the weakest space on the tour. The other half, they discover an edge they’ve never once mentioned in their marketing.
Step 2: Find the edge that actually matters
Every property has attributes. Very few owners know which attribute is the edge - the thing that matters to the tenant most likely to sign. Exposed ceilings don’t matter to an insurance office. A glass overhead door to a patio matters enormously to a taproom. The edge isn’t what makes your building special in general; it’s what makes it special to the business that wins there.
So define that business first. Who thrives in this location, this layout, this co-tenancy? Get specific - “a service business that lives on daytime foot traffic” beats “office/retail user.” Then rank your attributes by what that tenant pays a premium for.
Step 3: Communicate in decision language
Once you know the edge, stop burying it under bullet points. Tenants decide in outcomes, timelines, and dollars - so translate:
- “Corner glass storefront” becomes “your signage works 24/7 at one of the busiest corners in the district.”
- “Restrooms installed” becomes “you save $40–60K in build-out and open two months sooner.”
- “Adjacent parking” becomes “your customers never circle the block.”
Every feature earns its place in your marketing only when it’s attached to money, time, or customers. If you can’t attach it to one of those three, cut it.
Step 4: Fix what the walk-through exposed
Sometimes the honest answer is that your space loses the tour. That’s not a marketing problem - it’s a product problem, and it has a price tag. Paint, lighting, a cleaned-up entry, demo’ing a dated build-out: these routinely return multiples of their cost in rate and reduced vacancy. The most expensive thing most owners own is a space that shows poorly.
The bottom line
Your tenant is going to compare. The only question is whether you did the comparison first. Walk the competition, name your edge, and say it in the language of outcomes - and your property stops being one of four options and starts being the obvious one.