The fastest way to get commercial real estate clients as a tenant-rep or leasing broker is trigger-based outreach to tenants 12 to 18 months before their lease expires. Three signals say a space decision is near:
- A memorandum of lease or business journal lease roundup dated 3 to 5 years back
- A hiring round or funding filing that outgrows the floor plate
- A sublease listing or relocation announcement
Reach the CEO or CFO before the landlord’s renewal notice and you set the terms.
This guide compares six channels by estimated cost per representation and ends with a 30-day plan you can start this week.
| Channel | What it costs | What it returns |
|---|---|---|
| Referrals and repeat tenants | Close to $0 | 6 to 10 deals a year, closing at 50 to 70% |
| Attorney, CPA, and banker partnerships | 6 to 12 months of follow-up | 1 to 3 occupier clients a year each |
| Landlord listings | Marketing spend, 6 to 18 months on market | 2 to 6 occupier conversations per listing |
| CoStar, LoopNet, and CREXi | $400 to $1,000 a month for a CoStar seat | 1 to 4 portal inquiries a month |
| LinkedIn and associations | 3 to 5 hours a week | 1 to 3 occupier conversations a quarter |
| Trigger cold email | About $150 a month | 5 to 12 occupier meetings a month |
Referrals and repeat tenants
Referrals and repeat clients produce the cheapest representations, at close to $0 in direct cost, and they cap out at roughly 6 to 10 deals a year, an estimate from the brokers 2V Automation has worked with.
A tenant you represented signs again every 5 to 7 years and refers you perhaps once in that cycle. A book of 30 past clients throws off 4 to 6 warm conversations a year, closing at 50 to 70%.
Keep a renewal calendar for every past client and call 18 months out.
Attorney, CPA, and banker partnerships
Corporate attorneys, CPAs, and commercial bankers each send 1 to 3 occupier clients a year once the relationship is warm, at a cost of 6 to 12 months of follow-up.
Why each one sees the deal early:
- A lawyer sees the lease before signing.
- A CPA sees the rent line grow.
- A banker sees the credit line that funds the move.
Pick 10 of each and offer a free lease abstract and market survey for any client they send. Expect 1 in 5 relationships to become a repeat source, which is an estimate.
Landlord listing assignments
Landlord listings bring 2 to 6 occupier conversations per listing, because every tour is a tenant with a space decision open, at the cost of marketing spend and the 6 to 18 months a listing can sit.
The conflict is real. The tenant on the tour is the landlord’s prospect, and representing them later is often blocked by the listing agreement.
Use listings for the comparable deals in your emails and keep the tenant-side work separate.
CoStar, LoopNet, and directory presence
A CoStar seat runs $400 to $1,000 a month, an estimate from published broker pricing, and a LoopNet or CREXi profile brings 1 to 4 inquiries a month in a mid-size metro.
Most portal inquiries are under 2,500 square feet or already emailed three other brokers, so put a minimum size on your inquiry form.
The data side is the real value: CoStar’s lease expiration field feeds the method below directly if you already pay for the seat.
Without a seat, the county recorder and the business journal cover an estimated 60 to 80% of the same expirations at $0.
LinkedIn and industry associations
LinkedIn posting and association membership (NAIOP, SIOR, CCIM) produce 1 to 3 occupier conversations a quarter for 3 to 5 hours a week.
A quarterly post with asking rents and concessions for three building classes gets saved and forwarded.
LinkedIn also carries step 3 of the sequence below, where a note tied to the tenant’s own lease gets accepted 30 to 50% of the time, an estimate.
Trigger-based cold email
Trigger-based cold email is the channel with the lowest cost per representation that still scales, at about $150 a month in tools for 500 to 700 prospects and 5 to 12 occupier meetings.
The method, in four steps:
- Pull buying signals weekly.
- Memoranda of lease from the county recorder and business journal lease roundups dated 36 to 60 months back, which puts a 5-year lease 12 to 24 months from expiration.
- Job postings with 3 or more open roles at one address.
- Form D filings in your state from SEC EDGAR.
- Relocation announcements from the business journal and the economic development agency.
- Sublease listings on LoopNet and CREXi where the sublandlord is an operating company.
- Filter. Tenants 10 to 20 months from expiration, 2,500 square feet or more, 10 to 500 employees, within 60 km, with no Director of Real Estate on staff and no existing representation in your CRM.
- Find the decision maker. The CEO, CFO, or COO with Hunter, with the email verified by BetterContact.
- Send 3 emails and 1 LinkedIn touch over 14 days. Open with the building and the recorded term, and offer a written market survey within 5 business days.
“The memorandum of lease for 400 Main St shows a 5-year term from March 2022” gets read. “We are a full-service firm” gets deleted.
What the numbers look like
| Stage | On trigger sources |
|---|---|
| Reply rate | 2 to 5% |
| Replies on 500 to 700 prospects | 12 to 30 |
| Occupier meetings booked | 5 to 12 |
| Meeting to signed representation | 25 to 40% |
Plain company lists reply at 1 to 2%. Those figures are estimates for executive-level tenant outreach on a warmed domain, and the meeting count assumes you answer replies within 2 hours.
A CEO or CFO faces one lease decision every 5 to 7 years and reads about it once the date is inside 18 months.
The 25 to 40% meeting to representation rate is a fair estimate for lease expiration prospects, which puts the channel at 1 to 5 new representations a month from one sending domain.
The workflow, the filter logic, the sequence, and the stack costs are documented in the Commercial Real Estate Brokers Lead Gen System. It runs on n8n Cloud and you own it.
Buying leads versus owning a system
Buying commercial real estate leads costs $75 to $300 per lead, and each lead is shared with 3 to 5 brokers, so the real cost per exclusive conversation is 4 to 6 times the sticker price.
| Buying leads | Owning the system | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $75 to $300 per lead | About $150 a month in tools |
| Exclusivity | Shared with 3 to 5 brokers | Exclusive |
| Close rate | 5 to 10% | 25% at the meeting |
| Cost per representation | About $1,875 at $150 a lead and an 8% close | $45 to $150 once it runs |
| Time to first lead | Today | 2 to 3 weeks of domain warmup |
Those close rates are fair estimates. The $1,875 leaves out the hours spent racing other brokers to the phone, and the owned system produces 5 to 12 exclusive occupier meetings for its $150.
The trade is speed. If you need tours this month, buy a small batch of leads while the domain warms. If you need meetings every month for 3 years, build the system.
What to do first
Start by registering a separate sending domain in week 1, because domain warmup is the longest step. Here is a 30-day sequence.
Week 1: domain and accounts
- Buy a domain like [yourbrokerage]space.com. Never send cold email from your main domain.
- Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
- Create 2 inboxes and connect them to a warmup tool such as Instantly. Ramp from 10 to 60 emails a day per inbox.
- Open your accounts. An n8n Cloud workspace (about $24 a month), plus Apify, Hunter, and BetterContact.
Weeks 2 and 3: warm the domain, build the feed
Let the domain warm. Meanwhile, build the lease expiration feed, the highest-intent trigger with the least competition.
- Search the county recorder. Filter the document search to memoranda of lease recorded 36 to 60 months ago and pull the tenant name, premises, commencement date, and term.
- Add the business journal lease roundup archive for the same window, to catch leases that were never recorded.
- Write your filter. Office, flex, industrial, lab, and retail tenants, 2,500 square feet or more, 10 to 20 months from expiration, within 60 km.
- Collect 2 comparable deals per submarket.
- Draft the 4-step sequence. Have 3 people read the step 1 email out loud. Over 20 seconds, cut it.
Week 4: first full-volume send
Send from the lease expiration trigger only, 120 to 180 prospects in the first week. Reply within 2 hours and deliver every survey within 5 business days.
Track three numbers: reply rate, meeting rate, and representation rate.
Add the hiring and Form D trigger in month 2 and the announcement and sublease triggers in month 3. Keep the renewal calendar, the partnerships, and the quarterly submarket post running on top, because each is cheap and none conflict with the system.
That combination takes a tenant-rep broker from 8 representations a year to 25 in an estimated 18 months.
