Selecting and keeping the right tenant is crucial for the success of any commercial real estate business. Even more so for the retail sector. Finding quality retail tenants, however, can be a difficult and often a time-consuming and frustrating process.
Putting together a quality tenant mix who complement each other well is even harder, and often involves a certain amount of guesswork.
At AlphaMap, we know how hard finding a great tenant can be. We’re a team of seasoned technology entrepreneurs that began investing in commercial real estate a few years ago and we’ve experienced all the challenges.
It’s part of the reason why we developed AlphaMap, in order to provide a user-friendly GIS analytics platform to the CRE industry.
We’re taking things to the next level with the launch of our new TenantFinder™ feature which we believe is truly going to be a game changer for CRE professionals looking to find top-quality retail tenants quickly and easily.
In this article, we’ll take you through the challenges of the tenant finding process and show you how AlphaMap’s TenantFinder™ feature can help you overcome them.
The Importance of Finding Top-Quality Tenants
A retail center’s success is only possible with the right mix of well-matched, reliable tenants.
Good tenants that pay the rent on time, maintain a property well, and attract a steady stream of paying customers, can also help to increase a property's overall value.
Poor tenant selection, on the other hand, leads to not only financial losses from unpaid rent or unplanned repair costs, but also legal issues when the tenant needs to be evicted.
Not to mention the negative effect on the reputation of the retail center (nobody wants to shop at a mall where the shops keep changing).
The key is to get things right from the start. Take the time to develop a clear tenant search and selection process, and you’re likely to be rewarded.
Introducing the TenantFinder™ from AlphaMap
TenantFinder™ is a powerful new feature within AlphaMap's GIS platform, developed to help you supercharge your tenant-finding process. With AlphaMap's TenantFinder™ you'll be able to identify ideal tenant matches for your property in a matter of minutes.
TenantFinder™ is the next evolution of the old-school void analysis and market gap analysis.
TenantFinder™ does all the heavy lifting for you by analyzing location data, co-tenancy, and demographics for millions of locations nationwide to provide you with the best possible tenant matches for your property backed by data, not guesswork.
Whether you're a first-time CRE property owner or an experienced real estate broker or investor, TenantFinder™, with its user-friendly interface and powerful matching capabilities, should be your first-choice tool for a hassle-free, high-quality tenant search.
Benefits of Using the TenantFinder™
Here are some the ways AlphaMap’s TenantFinder™ can help you level up your tenant search:
Find and Contact the Best Tenants Faster
Searching for suitable tenants can be a time-consuming, months-long process. TenantFinder™ uses the most advanced algorithms to find the best tenant matches for your specific property at the click of a button.
In a matter of seconds, TenantFinder™ will analyze over 40,000 possible tenants for your property and provide you with a curated list of best-fit matches along with direct contact information for each one.
Reduce Vacancy Rates and Time on Market
TenantFinder™ automatically sources the best possible tenant matches for you from AlphaMap's, industry-largest, tenant database. Because of this you'll be able to fill vacancies faster by cutting the time that goes into research, listing, and marketing each space.
In addition to that, the recommendations from the TenantFinder™ are a best-fit for your property – these tenants are likely to stick around longer and pay higher rents.
Remove the Guesswork
Tenant finding involves a mixture of research and some well-qualified guesses from experienced professionals. A data-backed approach which utilizes highly trained algorithms to detect the patterns for why a tenant is a good fit, is much faster and more accurate.
With TenantFinder™ you'll also get a detailed match analysis report that tells you why a particular tenant is a good fit for your property so you are armed with the facts to help close a deal.
Use Cases for the TenantFinder™
For commercial real estate brokers, investors, owners and developers, there are countless use cases for the TenantFinder™ feature. Here are some examples:
- Qualifying your real estate investment decisions by backing up what you’re planning with real-time data.
- Running a market gap analysis.
- Finding a good mix of complementary tenants for a retail center.
- Choosing a new location for a business by deciding whether the existing tenants in the area will complement your retail brand.
- Finding a good anchor tenant for your retail center or filling out your center with local small businesses.
- Filling a vacancy with a quality tenant in a hurry.
Step-by-Step Guide to Using the TenantFinder™
- Log in to AlphaMap.
- Click on TenantFinder™ from the top navigation bar.
- Select your subject property.
- TenantFinder™ will analyze over 40,000 possible businesses/tenants and show you the best possible tenant matches for your location.
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- Utilize the filters and sorting to narrow in on tenants you are most interested in based on things like business category, location, size, and more.
- Once you’ve crafted your list of potential tenants, you can download the list, along with match analysis reports, and start reaching out to them.
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The Challenges Involved When Looking for Tenants
Although ‘old-school’ general marketing strategies can work when looking for tenants for a commercial or business property, they take A LOT of time and effort.
Tactics like leveraging your existing relationships, connecting through social media, posting on online listing sites, sending out mass emailers, cold calling, and more, bring in a trickle of leads but many of them will be unqualified, or sometimes even fraudulent. Usually there won’t be many, leaving you with fewer options.
Brokers and landlords usually have to spend hours filtering out the unqualified leads before they have a list of potential tenants. Finding accurate contact information can be just as difficult as bringing in the options in the first place.
You’re often left guessing whether a potential tenant would be a good fit for your property, because getting access to the data to back up your decision making is difficult.
Final Thoughts on Finding Quality Tenants with TenantFinder™
In highly competitive markets like retail, brokers and investors need cutting-edge tenant-finding strategies to stay ahead of the game. TenantFinder™ is a powerful tool that significantly simplifies the tenant finding process, reduces vacancies, and leads to long-lasting profitable business partnerships (with great tenants).