The first email to a prospective tenant, and why most of them fail

Most cold approaches to prospective tenants fail for the same reason: they are about the space. The landlord has a unit, the unit has features, and the email lists them. From the recipient’s side that is an advert for something they were not shopping for, and it is deleted in the two seconds it takes to recognise the shape.

The emails that get answered are about the recipient’s business. Same unit, same facts, different subject.

The four parts

1. The reason it is them. One sentence, specific enough that it could not be sent to anyone else. “Your Mill Street bakery is trading out of 700 sq ft with a queue on the pavement most mornings” is a reason. “We have a retail unit available” is not. This sentence does most of the work, and it is the part templates cannot supply.
2. Three numbers, not thirty. Size, asking rent, and the one local figure that matters to their format, which might be weekday footfall, the anchor next door, or the office headcount within a five minute walk. Everything else goes in the attachment.
3. One small ask. A walkthrough this week. Not a proposal, not a call to “discuss your requirements”, and never a document to sign. The purpose of a first email is a second conversation.
4. A one-page PDF. Numbers, three photographs, a map, one line on the trade. It lets an interested reader forward you internally without writing anything themselves, which is how most deals travel inside a business.

Subject lines

Say what it is. “1,400 sq ft on Mill Street, next to the Post Office” tells the reader whether to open it and is honest about the contents, which CAN-SPAM requires anyway. Curiosity-gap subjects get opened once and teach the recipient to distrust your address, which is an expensive trade for a single open.

The rules, which are not onerous but are enforced

Commercial email in the United States falls under CAN-SPAM. The FTC’s compliance guide sets out the whole of it, and the parts that touch a leasing email are simple:

• Truthful From, Reply-To and routing information, and a subject line that matches the body.
• A valid physical postal address in the message.
• A clear way to opt out, honoured within ten business days, and the mechanism kept working for at least thirty days after you send.

Penalties are assessed per email, into the tens of thousands of dollars each, so this is not a corner worth cutting on a twenty-message campaign. It also costs nothing: a signature block with an address and a line offering to stop writing satisfies all three.

Following up

Once, after about five business days, in the same thread. Add something rather than repeating yourself: a photograph of the unit at the time of day their format cares about, or the news that a neighbouring unit has let. Then stop. A third and fourth chase converts almost nobody and costs you the relationship for the next vacancy, which in a market where you will meet these operators repeatedly is the real price.

Why the specific sentence is the hard part

Everything above is easy except the first line, and the first line is the one that decides whether the rest gets read. Writing it requires knowing something true about that business: what it trades in, how big its current unit is, whether it is expanding, what its neighbourhood thinks of it. Twenty of those, researched by hand, is most of a week.

That research is what Atlas returns with every match, which is what makes the sentence writable: the reason each business surfaced, the size it usually takes, its location count, and the person who signs. Drafted outreach that writes the first message from exactly those facts is in development and coming shortly. Until then the method above is entirely doable by hand, and the guide to finding commercial tenants covers where the twenty names come from. The plan is $200 a month.

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