Companies move, expand and renegotiate on a schedule they rarely announce. Outbound reaches the people who decide on space, in the window before a lease expires or a headcount plan needs a bigger floor, with a reason specific to their building and their market.
Hi Daniel,
Your lease on the fourth floor at Lavaca Street runs to next October, and by my count you have added around fifty people since you signed it in 2022, which is a lot to fit on one floor.
There are two spaces within four blocks that would take the current team plus a year of hiring, at a lower rate per square foot than your building is asking on renewal. I represented a software firm your size on the same move last year, with the fit-out covered by the landlord.
Would a fifteen-minute call be useful before your landlord opens renewal talks?
[Your name]
Commercial brokerage runs on relationships and on the renewal calendar. A tenant rep wins the assignment by being the person a COO already knows when the notice date is eighteen months out, and an investment sales broker wins the listing by having called the owner for six years. Both work, and both are limited by how many people one broker can call. The tenant who has never met you signs the renewal the landlord sent, and nobody ever knows there was a deal.
When brokerages try outbound themselves it usually means a junior agent, a database export and a subject line about market conditions, sent to everyone in a submarket regardless of where they are in their lease. The reader has no reason to answer because the email is not about their building. Run properly, the email goes to the person who controls the lease, a year or more before it expires, and it talks about their floor, their headcount and the two spaces nearby that would fit.
Real estate outbound is about timing and specifics: the building, the expiry, the growth. We build lists from lease data and hiring signals so every email lands in the right window.
We build the list by building, not by industry. Lease data, sublease listings, hiring pages and expansion announcements tell us which companies are approaching a decision and who signs it: the founder or COO under two hundred people, the head of real estate or workplace above that. We exclude anyone in your CRM, any tenant you already represent and any building where you have a listing conflict.
Before writing, our copywriters look at the tenant's actual situation: how long they have been in the building, how much they have hired since they signed, whether they have listed sublease space, what the landlord has done with the rest of the floor and what comparable space is asking nearby. For owners, they read the loan maturity, the hold period and recent trades in the submarket.
Real estate emails fail when they open with market commentary. Ours open with the prospect's building and one fact about their lease or their growth, then offer one specific thing: a floor nearby, a number on renewal versus relocation, a buyer active in their asset class. No market reports, no firm history and no service list, because the reader knows what a broker does. It ends with a short call.
We send Tuesday to Thursday mornings in the prospect's time zone, from dedicated domains we warm for three to four weeks, so nothing touches your brokerage's domain. Timing follows the lease: office tenants twelve to twenty-four months before expiry, industrial earlier because the buildings are scarcer, owners in the quarter before a loan matures. Follow-ups go a few days apart and stop the moment anyone replies.
Replies come to you and to the portal, sorted into interested, not now and out of office. An interested tenant usually asks about the space you mentioned, so the broker on that market should answer the same day with a floor plan or a tour time. Not now replies get a date, because a lease two years out is still a deal. We adjust submarkets and timing every two weeks.
The signal is the expiry date and the headcount growth, two things the COO knows are true and has probably not yet done anything about. The proof is one comparable move with one concrete outcome, the fit-out, rather than a market report. It leaves out the brokerage's ranking, the market overview and any mention of commission, because none of those are why Daniel replies.
It happens, and we write for it. The email states the date as we understand it and the prospect corrects it if it is wrong, which is still a reply, and often a useful one. Corrected dates go straight into the portal so the follow-up and the next campaign use the right timing, and we tighten the data source for that submarket.
Before the first send you give us your landlord assignments, your listings and any tenant rep engagements, and those buildings and companies are excluded permanently. We check every new batch against that list, and you can add to it whenever a new assignment comes in.
The ones you want are. A company that starts looking six months before expiry has usually already lost its bargaining position, and the landlord knows it. Writing twelve to twenty-four months out means the email arrives while the decision is still open, which is why the copy is about their timeline and not about space that is available this week.