Hire a middleman when revitalizing properties

The life cycle of a retail property depends largely on its location and tenants. However, all retail properties eventually need updating or repositioning in the marketplace. Ignore a building’s slow slide toward obsolescence, and you risk managing an empty, decaying retail albatross.

Repositioning or revitalizing a property means more than slapping some paint on the walls and putting a new sign out front. Depending on the property, it can include changing parking configurations, redoing a building’s façade, subtly altering a structure’s footprints, tenant shuffling, ejecting poor-performing tenants, and attracting desirable ones.

As property manager, you want to create a buzz with tenants about the revitalization. Get them excited and communicate your vision for the property. Some of these tenants, however, may not share your vision or may realize that they’re not part of it. That’s where a consultant comes in handy.

You continue to handle your duties as you have in the past, preserving good tenant relations, while your consultant deals with the unpleasant particulars of the revitalization—inconveniencing a business during construction, pushing tenants to swap spaces, or informing a tenant that his lease will not be renewed in the future.

It’s a classic good cop/bad cop scenario, where you can reposition or refurbish your retail property without being seen as the bearer of bad news—even though tenants realize your involvement.

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