Two are fixed. Nobody can change them. Two are the owner's responsibility. One is the agent's. Most commercial properties that stall are failing on one of the three that can actually be changed.
Every commercial property that moves does so because all five of these are working together. Every commercial property that stalls is failing on at least one of them.
The type of property, its size, and its physical characteristics. Nobody changes these.
Location is given. You cannot move a building. But you can understand who it works for.
How the property looks and feels to a buyer or tenant. This is controllable.
The asking price or rent. Owners set this. Owners can change it. It is the most powerful lever available.
How the property is presented to the market, who sees it, and what compels them to act.
The property type, the size, the layout, the construction, the use class, the physical condition. These are the starting point for everything else. They define who the property is suitable for and who it is not.
This factor is fixed. There is nothing an owner or an agent can do to change what a property fundamentally is. A 500 sq ft ground floor unit is not going to appeal to a business that needs 5,000 sq ft of open-plan warehouse space. That is not a failure of marketing. It is a factual mismatch.
Understanding what the property is tells you who it is for. Everything that follows — pricing, presentation, marketing — works from that starting point.
The agent's job on this factor is not to change it, but to understand it properly. The right buyer or tenant for any property exists. Finding them starts with being clear and specific about what the property actually is — not what the owner hopes it might be perceived as.
The foundation of everything. Fixed, factual, and the starting point for understanding who the right buyer or tenant is.
Location is fixed. You cannot move a building. A commercial property on a secondary retail parade is not on a primary retail parade, and no amount of marketing will change that.
But location is also more nuanced than most agents present it. Where a property is matters differently to different types of occupier. A unit on a secondary retail parade might be a poor fit for a national convenience retailer but a strong fit for a beauty salon, a dentist, or a community service. An industrial unit on the edge of town might be exactly what a trade counter business needs.
The question is not whether the location is good or bad. The question is who the location works for — and whether the marketing is reaching them.
When a property is stalling and location is cited as the reason, the right response is to interrogate that assumption. Is the location genuinely the barrier? Or is the property being shown to the wrong type of buyer or tenant for that location?
Fixed. But the right question is not whether the location is good — it is who the location works for.
This is the first of the three factors that can be changed — and it is the one most owners underestimate. Presentation is not just about how clean the property is. It is about how it is photographed, how it is described, how it feels when a buyer or tenant walks in, and whether it communicates its potential or just its current state.
Commercial property is routinely photographed badly. Dark interiors. Cluttered spaces. Images taken on a phone at chest height that make a reasonable property look smaller and less appealing than it is. The same property, photographed properly with the lights on and the clutter removed, generates more enquiries. That is not marketing — that is presentation.
A buyer or tenant is buying potential. Presentation is what makes that potential visible.
Owners can change this. Sometimes it requires money — a deep clean, a coat of paint, clearing years of accumulated equipment. Sometimes it just requires effort. But it is always within the owner's control, and it is always worth addressing before the property goes to market.
Controllable. Often underestimated. The difference between a property that photographs well and one that does not is the difference between an enquiry and no enquiry.
Price is the most powerful lever available to a commercial property owner. It is also the most resisted. Owners set the price. Owners can change it. And when a property is not moving, price is almost always a factor — even when every other factor is right.
This does not mean an owner should accept less than their property is worth. It means the price should reflect the market the property is being sold or let into, not the price the owner needs to achieve or the price a previous valuation suggested three years ago.
An overpriced property does not generate offers. It generates viewings from people who walk away, silence from people who never enquire, and an extended void that costs more than the price reduction would have.
The conversation about price is one of the most important an agent has. A good agent has it at the start of the instruction, not three months in when the market has already formed a view. A poor agent accepts the owner's number to win the instruction and avoids the conversation until it becomes unavoidable.
At The Commercial Property Experts, the conversation about price happens at valuation. Not later.
The most powerful lever. Owners control it. And the conversation about it should happen at valuation — not three months later.
This is the only factor that is entirely the agent's responsibility. Not the owner's. Not the market's. The agent's.
Most commercial agents list property. They upload details to Rightmove, put up a board, and wait. That is not marketing. That is presence. The assumption behind it is that the right buyer or tenant will find the property themselves and make contact. Sometimes they do. Often they do not.
Marketing is the difference between waiting for the right buyer to find the property, and going to find the right buyer for the property.
Proper marketing for commercial property means identifying who the right buyer or tenant actually is, understanding where they are, and reaching them directly. It means professional photography and well-written particulars. It means proactive outreach to the database of buyers and tenants who have already registered interest in this type of property. It means Showcase Viewings that create competition and urgency rather than a drip feed of individual appointments that generate no momentum.
Rightmove is a tool. It is not a strategy. An agent who treats portal listing as the extent of their marketing obligation is failing on the one factor they are entirely responsible for.
This is the factor we take most seriously. It is why we built The Commercial Property Experts the way we did.
The only factor that is entirely the agent's responsibility. Not the owner's. Not the market's. The agent's.
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