NovaLoca Blog

Retail, as we all know, was always going to be one of the first market’s that was hit when the credit crunch began to have a greater impact on our daily lives. With the cost of living going up those I phones and Chloe handbags are just going to have to wait!

Think for one moment about how the retailers themselves must feel. Sales volumes dropped by 3.9% between May and June 2008, that’s the biggest decline since 1986! You can surely understand then, why some retailers are asking for the rental instalments of their retail premises to be changed to monthly. Shockingly though instead of retail property owners and landlord’s having sympathy for the retailers they may now begin to ask for 6 months rent in advance. This is double the amount normally expected. We are all aware that the commercial property market has been suffering as well (being in its worse state for 15 years) but when commercial property agents tell us at NovaLoca that “they haven’t possibly got time to answer every enquiry” for a retail property that their clients are paying them to find a tenant for it is implied that it is the property agents who should be tightening their budgets not the tenants!

Yes, commercial property landlords need to make a living too but if they make it too difficult for a retailer to pay the rent they run the risk of loosing the tenant entirely rather than the rent being paid a little late.

There are offers available to help you and your commercial property agent do everything possible to avoid your retail premises ending up on the commercial property shelf such as free property marketing offered by online commercial property search engine, NovaLoca. But make sure you follow up on the leads this marketing generates.

Email has become the main form of communication between commercial property agents and their occupiers, but does this form of correspondence reflect your agency’s standards of professionalism and customer care and are the sales opportunities taken?

What Has Been Said?

Commercial property search engine, NovaLoca, allows occupiers to contact the property agent directly from the website. The agents replies are then fed back to the occupier also via the site. Some of the common replies from agents we see include:

What Does this Mean for Your Business?

• Customer services: If you don’t send a message with an attachment or don’t bother to reply at all you are unlikely to give the impression of a commercial property agency that cares about their occupiers or that will go the extra mile to find them the best property which suits their requirements.
• Professionalism: If you reply to say the property is sold or that you are no longer dealing with the property this is likely to give the impression that your records and advertising is out of date. This will not give the professional ‘on top of everything’ image you are probably striving for.
• Opportunities missed: Simple one line replies such as those above don’t make the most of the opportunity you have to engage a new occupier. You have an occupier in front of you who is looking for a property, although you may not be able to fill their requirement now do they go away knowing who you are and what you can offer them? Will they contact you in the future? If they receive one of the replies above, the answer is probably ‘no’ and you have missed an opportunity.

How Can You Make the Most of Your Email Replies?

• Introduce yourself and your agency. This does not need to be long, just enough to ensure the occupier knows who you are, what you can offer and how they can contact you in future. This could be a pre-written email which you simply attach the necessary property details to when an enquiry comes in.
• Make sure that when you say you are sending an attachment you actually send one. If may be worthwhile noting in the text of the email what you will be attaching, therefore the occupier will know exactly what they should be receiving and can ask for anything that is missing.
• Keep your property advertising up to date to avoid occupiers contacting you about a property that is no longer available. This will save their time as well as yours.
• If you are contacted about a property that is no longer available or which you are no longer representing reply to the occupier and tell them this but go the extra mile and send them a list of similar vacant properties which you are currently marketing. There is still the opportunity for a sale here even if the initial enquiry does not work out so make the most of it.
• Most importantly of all, reply to them with something! You are never going to make the most of an enquiry if they hear nothing from you.

If you have any more examples of what not to say in an email or for more information about how NovaLoca can help you find occupiers for your commercial property please contact the NovaLoca customer services team on 0844 3575 260 or email info@novaloca.com.

It has been four months since Energy Performance Certificate’s (EPC’s) began to be phased into the commercial property market and only three months until they will become compulsory for all commercial property over 50m² being sold, let or built. So what exactly do they mean for a commercial property owner?

What will the EPC tell me?

After an Energy Assessor has made an assessment of the property, the details are loaded into government-approved software which will produce the EPC for the property. This certificate will:

· Provide general information about the energy efficiency and carbon emissions of the building;

· Give a rating on a standardised scale of A to G (A being the best) of how energy efficient the property is. This allows the property to be accurately compared to similar buildings;

· Make recommendations about how the property’s energy efficiency, and therefore it’s rating, could be improved, as well as giving a realistic indication of what grading the property could achieve if the recommendations are put in place.

What Can I Do To Improve My Properties’ Energy Efficiency?

Whether your reasons for being interested in the results of the required survey are based on an environmental concern and wanting to “go green”, or the desire to save money on the buildings’ running cost during the increase in fuel prices the fact is there are some very simple measures you can take to improve the energy efficiency of your office space, retail premises or industrial unit.

· Reduce waste and recycle what waste you do have: reuse paper; cancel junk mail and think before you print.

· Use energy efficiently: turn the heating off rather than just opening a window; turn lights off when they are not needed; use energy efficient light bulbs; put electrical equipment (e.g. water cooler) on a timer so it turns off at the end of the day, and fit draught excluders on doors and windows.

· Use water efficiently: ensure water appliances are efficient and fix leaking taps etc.

For further ideas about improving your commercial property’s energy rating visit Business Link and use their questionnaire to help you assess your current energy efficiency level.

How Will the EPC’s affect the Marketing of My Commercial Property?

Many articles have been published claiming the positive and negative effects EPC’s could have on the marketability of commercial properties in relation to the perceived costs of high or low energy efficient properties.

The Manchester Evening News carried a story suggesting that although the “government wants to encourage tenants to move into industrial and commercial buildings which are more environmentally friendly… the introduction of EPC’s may well lead to the opposite happening over the long term, by making less environmentally friendly buildings less expensive and therefore more popular”. (Read the full article here.) This implies that owners of commercial property with a good energy efficiency rating could find it more difficult to market their property and find occupiers due to the perceived higher cost compared to lower efficiency properties. However, we would suggest that this higher initial cost will soon be recouped as the running and maintenance costs will be reduced in the longer term, whereas the opposite would be true of a less energy efficient property where the initial outlay could be less but the long term costs are likely to be higher as energy is wasted. If an occupier thinks for the long term they are likely to be put off by this and choose the more energy efficient property instead.

In addition to this, owners of industrial units, offices and retail space which are eligible to have an EPC are entitled to claim tax breaks against the cost of installing systems which will help to make the property more energy efficient. This comes under a new government incentive to encourage more energy efficiency amongst commercial property as well as to help property agents and owners “stay ahead of the game” (read the full article here) and make the marketing of their property easier based on the energy rating they receive.

Marketing commercial property will now require additional focus on the energy performance rating it holds and the benefits this will bring to the occupier. To find out more information about the energy efficiency of the commercial properties listed on NovaLoca and to find out how to get your commercial property listed, contact the customer services team on 08443575260.

Open any newspaper and you will find articles about the ‘credit crunch’ and the impact it is having, especially on the property market. Take for example Tony McDonough’s article in the Liverpool Daily Post,”Property Sales Set to Fall By a Third” which claims that, “Property experts are predicting that the total volume of property traded globally this year will fall by at least a third because of the credit crunch”.

Having read such articles, the online commercial property search engine NovaLoca, spoke to the agents listing on the website and found that many have recently decided to stop all their marketing in order to save on expenses as they ride out the financial difficulties. However, the continued growth NovaLoca has seen over the past year is due to commercial property agents choosing to market their vacant properties, whether that be offices, industrial units, retail spaces or even land, on this property search tool. This increase in properties being advertised on NovaLoca implies that marketing using the internet continues to be a cost effective way of finding occupiers for properties and increasing property turnover as commercial agents continue to invest in online marketing even during these times when finances are a bit stretched.

Read Tony McDonough’s full article and why not contact the NovaLoca customer services team on 0844 3575 260 to find out how marketing properties online with them can help to generate more leads for your commercial properties.

This week has seen a number of news headlines regarding the commercial property industry which read something like “World Commercial Property Deals Down 41%”. With headlines like that the question has to be asked: Are agents making full use of the free marketing available to them?

To gain maximum exposure when renting out office space or if you have commercial property for sale, then there couldn’t be a better time to join the NovaLoca.com. Not only is the commercial property search engine moving up in Google rankings but in just six months they made Google sit up and pay attention marking their site as a site of importance by increasing their page rank from 0-5, driving more and more visitors to the site each month 65,000 last month.

They are, for a limited time, taking all agents with them, completely free. All companies and commercial property agents throughout the UK can easily load all of their properties, whether it be office space, retail property, industrial units or even land, on the site for free, or if time is of the essence then contact the NovaLoca team and they can do all the work for you!  The 60,000 occupiers that visit NovaLoca each month are then just a click away from the perfect commercial property for their business and the agents are one step closer to finding occupiers for their properties.

It is a match made in heaven when agents meet Novaloca. You see, some agents are extremely good when it comes to being proactive in marketing their client’s properties. However, some are still under the notion that they don’t have to do much to get their commercial property let or sold. I would say this was the case in the past but would now agree that it could be true, as long as their portfolio of commercial properties is listed on Novaloca that is!

Agents are good at what they are trained to do and NovaLoca are experts in what they do and they are offering agents opportunity to use the knowledge they have gained from hours of research by the NovaLoca team. Find some of this expertise in NovaLoca’s blog or to find out more information about listing on NovaLoca contact them on 08443575260.

The location of a business is crucial. One of the earliest decisions any entrepreneur has to make is where to locate the business. ‘Am I near my main customer base?’, ‘Are there good transport links close by?’, ‘Will people be able to find me and are they the people who would use my service?’ With all these questions floating around and each one affecting whether a location is right, they all need to be considered and assessed carefully in order to find that ideal spot.

If you want to build your commercial property yourself, you have another question to ask; do the plans fit with the locality? Tesco’s recent application for a 70,000 sq ft store in St Albans, Hertfordshire was strongly opposed by the city’s residents. According to one article, although two letters were received to support the plans, the council said that it had received a petition by the St Albans Civic Society with 5,000 signatures against the plans, which raised the issues that the scheme was “out of scale, out of character, showed a lack of respect for the conservation area and would have a negative impact on the St Albans city brand” (Read the full article by Deirdre Hipwell and Christine Eade here).

As this shows it is vital to find the right location for your business which satisfies all these questions. This is essential in helping you find your place in the market and successfully attracting the right customer base around you.

Commercial property websites list thousands of industrial units, office spaces and retail premises located all over the country which are available for sale or lease. For example, NovaLoca currently lists 20,000 properties across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and with the simple search tool it helps businesses find property in the right location. To find out how NovaLoca could help you find your commercial property visit NovaLoca.com or call the customer services team on 0845 094 7902.

I recently read an article on a surveyors and valuer’s website called Cheffins which discusses how life is becoming harder for valuer’s due to the rapid changes in the UK financial market over the past year. They suggest that with the credit crunch looming over all markets at the moment, it’s of little surprise that the commercial property industry is slowing as well.

However, it’s now not just the selling that’s getting harder as peoples purse strings tighten. Life is also getting tougher for commercial property valuer’s. Previously they could rely on transactional evidence of a property to help them valuate it, but now it’s becoming increasingly difficult as the finance market is thinning and changing at such a rapid rate. With no real evidence as to where the commercial property market is heading it’s now even more crucial for valuer’s to have a true understanding and thorough knowledge of their market.

It has become clear to commercial property portal NovaLoca that commercial property valuer’s need to be very knowledgeable in regards to what has changed in the past, and especially in the past year, in order to predict what could happen in the future. One of the future developments for NovaLoca.com includes adding details of completed sales to database providing valuer’s with a tool to track changes in value of a given property and the commercial property market as a whole. For more information of this contact the customer services team on 0844 3575260.

NovaLoca analysed approximately 4000 telephone enquiries made to agents about the commercial properties they have listed on NovaLoca.com and a startling difference in the length of the calls was revealed.

· The average length of a call was 105 seconds.

· Some agencies were showing an average call length of over two and a half times this time.

· One company received 141 telephone enquiries with an average call length of 259 seconds.

These differences suggest that some agents are answering calls more efficiently & engaging with potential occupiers in a more positive way. When leads are harder to come by are you sure you are making the most of every chance you have to find occupiers for your commercial property?

To find out where you rank in our data of who is converting the most leads or to discuss how you could easily get your property listed on NovaLoca call the customer services team on 0844 3575 260.