What’s The Most Important Service a Broker Can Provide a Tenant?

In order to better understand how closely brokers’ and tenants’ expectations aligned, we decided to ask the following question: What is the most important service a broker can provide a tenant?

Check out the responses below to see the top answers provided by both sides. You might be surprised to see the differences in the feedback we got.

What is the most important service a broker can provide a tenant?

Top broker responses:

Broker Replies.png

Breakdown:

  • Market knowledge: 21% of responses
  • Locating a space that meets their needs: 15% of responses
  • Good communication/Timeliness: 13% of responses
  • Accuracy: 12% of responses
  • Lease negotiations: 10% of responses
  • Honesty: 7% of responses
  • CRE knowledge/ advice: 6% of responses

Top tenant responses:

Tenant Replies.png

Breakdown:

  • Good communication/Timeliness: 37% of responses
  • Locating a space that meets their needs: 15% of responses
  • Helping them get a good deal: 12% of responses
  • Honesty: 8% of responses
  • Market knowledge: 6% of responses
  • Negotiation skills: 5% of responses
  • Access to hard-to-find listings: 4% of responses

What conclusions can we draw from this?

Market knowledge may not be the most important attribute for a broker from the tenant’s perspective. While this was the number one response from brokers, less than 2% of tenant responses had market knowledge listed as most important broker service.

The second most popular response from brokers was locating a space that meets the tenant’s needs.  Tenants too felt that this was important, and it was a match for second place.  There’s really no surprise here, this is a universal expectation.  

Good and timely communication from brokers is essential for tenants, making this attribute the number one ranked response from tenants with 37% of the responses. Only 13% of brokers marked this as the most important attribute, ranking it the third most popular attribute among broker responses.

Tenants want to get a good deal, and they expect their brokers to help. This answer seems like a no-brainer, so we were surprised that there was a bit of a mismatch between the two groups. For tenants, this was listed in their top three responses. For brokers, this came in as the 12th most popular response with only a small percentage falling this category. We could dive into the differences of responses between landlord representative brokers and tenant representative brokers, and hopefully we would see a difference. However, if we take this at face value, brokers who leverage this attribute could have a big opportunity to attract new clients. 

Tell us what you think! Is this feedback different from what you had expected?