How Tenant Advisory Group Works With AI and Technology Companies

Tenant Advisory Group, or TAG, is a commercial real estate brokerage based in Chicago. Bill Himmelstein founded the firm in July 2008. We represent companies that occupy space, as tenants or as buyers, across office, clinical and industrial property. We work in Chicago and its suburbs, and we coordinate searches for clients in other cities.

Since 2008 the firm has completed 500+ transactions totaling $1.5B+ in transaction value, with $350M+ saved for clients.

The position matters more than the numbers. A landlord’s leasing agent is hired to lease a building on the best terms for its owner. We are hired by the company that will occupy the space. That relationship is put in a written representation agreement before any work starts.

We want to be precise here. Our client history is with technology, software and data companies: software development firms, a product data company, systems integrators, IT service providers and digital product studios. We do not hold ourselves out as having a roster of AI companies, and you should be cautious of any broker whose AI credentials are a label and nothing more.

What we can say is that the real estate problems are closely related. A company building AI products is, from a landlord’s point of view, a technology tenant: growing unevenly, often venture funded, hard to underwrite on a conventional credit basis, and likely to need more power, cooling, connectivity and security than a typical office user. Those are the problems our technology clients have brought to us for years.

That client ran its technology and product development group from a shared office in Chicago and had outgrown it. The engagement started with a ranked list of requirements and ended with the company in its own space.

Every search follows the same discipline, whatever the size of the requirement.

1. Brief: we document headcount ranges, attendance patterns, location limits, budget, technical needs and timing, ranked by importance.
2. Lease review: if you occupy space now, we read the lease for notice dates, options and exit rights.
3. Survey: we assemble direct, sublease and spec options that fit, including space we know about that is not yet publicly listed.
4. Tours: we organize them, attend them, and keep the conversation with landlord agents on our side of the table.
5. Proposals: we request written proposals from several landlords at once so each knows it is competing.
6. Analysis: we compare proposals on total cost and on flexibility, not on headline rent.
7. Letter of intent: we negotiate the business terms with the finalists.
8. Lease: we work alongside your attorney so the document reflects what was agreed.
9. After signing: we stay involved through build-out and track the dates that matter for your next decision.

The same process applies to a renewal. Testing the market before talking to your current landlord is how a tenant gets leverage in a negotiation where the landlord otherwise assumes you will stay.

The requests we hear most often from technology clients fall into a few groups.

• Growth that outruns the lease. One technology client outgrew its space early in its term, and we negotiated a move into larger space with the same landlord without a penalty.
• Leaving shared space. Clients that started in coworking or a shared office come to us when the cost and the lack of privacy stop making sense.
• Moving from a sublease to a direct lease, either in the same suite or in a better building nearby.
• Right-sizing. A software firm we have represented in more than one city reduced its footprint within its building and left a larger lease early.
• Infrastructure inside the suite. For one technology client, the landlord’s work included correcting air conditioning problems in the server room, adding keyless card entry and adding electrical and data outlets.
• Speed. When a company is growing quickly, the search has to move at the pace of hiring.

For companies working on AI, we add questions about equipment rooms, supplemental cooling, electrical capacity, connectivity and physical security to the brief from the first meeting, and we ask landlords to answer them in writing.

Knowing the edge of our work is part of serving you well.

• We do not procure data center capacity. Large-scale training compute normally sits with a cloud or colocation provider. Our work is the office, flex and industrial space your people and your hardware teams occupy.
• We are not engineers. We know which questions to ask about power, cooling and floor loading, and we bring in or work with the engineer or architect who verifies the answers.
• We are not your attorney. We negotiate business terms and flag issues in the lease. Legal review belongs with counsel, and we work alongside the attorney you choose.
• We do not give tax or accounting advice. Questions about lease accounting or the tax treatment of improvements go to your CPA.

In a standard lease transaction, the landlord pays the brokerage commission as part of the deal. That is the usual arrangement for the tenant representation we provide, and it is stated in the representation agreement so you can see it in writing.

Some assignments are structured differently, including purchases, certain subleases and consulting work. We explain how compensation works on your specific assignment before the search begins. Ask us, and ask any broker you interview.

That comment comes from the president of a systems integration firm that had outgrown its space.

Interview more than one firm. Bring the same questions to each and compare the answers.

• ✓Who at the firm will run our search day to day?
• ✓Can you show us work for technology, software or data companies and let us read what those clients said?
• ✓How do you handle a market outside your home city?
• ✓How would you structure a lease for a company whose headcount could change sharply?
• ✓What will you ask landlords about power, cooling, connectivity and security?
• ✓How are you paid on this assignment, and is that in the agreement?
• ✓What do you need from us in the first few weeks?

We are comfortable being measured against those questions. If a requirement falls outside our work, such as data center capacity, we will say so at the first conversation.