Commercial Brokerages Editing and Proofreading Services

Two units are on the market at £22 a square foot. One is offering nine months rent free on a ten-year term with a landlord contribution to fit-out; the other is offering three months and nothing. They are not the same price and they are not close, but the particulars for both say £22 — because headline rent is what the market quotes and effective rent is what tenants actually pay.

We edit what commercial agents and brokerages produce — letting and sales particulars, marketing brochures and their measurement and specification content, quoting terms and incentive descriptions, heads of terms and offer documentation, tenant and investor requirement briefs, market reports and rental evidence commentary, viewing and access information, availability schedules and rent rolls, disposal and acquisition reports to clients, and pitch documents for instructions. Our editors work on the particulars a tenant will compare against three others.

Letting particulars are where commercial agency is either informative or merely competitive, and their failure is quoting a headline figure without the terms that define it. A rent per square foot is meaningless without the term, the incentive and the measurement basis it rests on. We work through these so the quoting terms are stated together — the rent, the term, the rent-free period, any landlord contribution, the break option and the service charge estimate — since these are what a tenant's adviser will assemble anyway and doing it for them is a competitive advantage rather than a disclosure; so the measurement basis is named and the area given on that basis, because a net internal area and a gross internal area of the same unit differ by enough to change the ranking of two properties; so the service charge is given as an actual figure per square foot with the year it relates to, given that this is the cost tenants most often discover late; so the specification is stated in the terms an occupier uses — the clear height at the lowest point rather than the highest, the actual power supply, the number of parking spaces and the ratio; so anything that will disappoint on a viewing is mentioned in the particulars, as this converts a wasted viewing into a qualified one; and so availability, planning use and any condition are stated plainly. Particulars written this way produce fewer viewings and more offers.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client instructions, terms and marketing material. We are editors rather than surveyors or agents, and we offer no view on values, terms or measurement. What we can do is make the quoting basis visible enough to be compared.