Q&A from the Corner Office
David Livshin, president and CEO of The Dagar Group Ltd. in Fishkill, said the commercial brokerage needed to rethink time-tested strategies of leasing space because of the economy.
Q: How are you marketing vacant retail properties?
Livshin: “The first thing that we did was to actually go out into the marketplace and secure additional properties for leasing. These new properties supplemented the existing space we had for lease. By having more available space under our control, it gave us a higher probability of matching specific user needs to the appropriate location.
“While we continue to utilize window and property leasing signs, we have also made our properties available on Loopnet and CoStar. This is in addition to our web site, which we update weekly. Another tool was to list the spaces individually, not the properties, as a whole on Craigslist. This choice has generated surprisingly good leads at several locations. Dagar now almost exclusively uses email to pass on leasing materials to potential tenants and brokers alike. It is very rare for us to send out the normal leasing package by U.S. mail, which until recently was a basic staple of the leasing industry.
“Over the last six months, there has been a large amount of interest in smaller store spaces. These spaces tend to be in the 1,000-square-foot to 1,500-square-foot range. We are nearing completion on a 22,000-square-foot project, which at the beginning of the year had only one committed tenant … all the leads to finish this project and begin leasing up others came from utilizing these techniques.
“The most important single strategy we employ at Dagar is that every call made to our office is returned. That may seem obvious and straightforward, but you would be surprised when speaking with tenants how often they are actually surprised by our prompt response to their inquiry.”
The web site is dagargroup.com.
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