Which channels produced occupiers who signed?

Tenant representation is free to the occupier: the landlord pays the commission at lease completion. That makes the marketing a pure acquisition exercise for mandates, with the revenue arriving from a third party much later.

It also means the usual proxies fail. There is no transaction with the client to measure, no invoice to them, and the only record connecting the campaign to the money is the occupier's identity on both the inquiry and the completed deal.

Reconciling those two records is therefore the only mechanism available. It works precisely because it does not depend on the payment flowing between the same two parties.

Commission scales with rent, term and area. A single large corporate requirement can carry a broker's year, while a dozen small suite deals barely register against it.

Ranking channels on mandates won treats those identically. Ranking on commission collected shows which channels reach occupiers with real requirements, and that is usually a much narrower set than the inquiry volume suggests.

Occupiers do not go to the market because a campaign reached them. They go because a lease is expiring, a break option is approaching, a landlord has served notice, the headcount has outgrown the floor, or a merger has left the business paying for two buildings. Those dates were fixed years ago in a document sitting in somebody's filing system, and no amount of advertising will bring a requirement forward by a single month if the occupier has three years left to run.

This inverts the usual relationship between marketing and demand, and most reporting is not built for the inversion. The job is not to create a requirement but to be the firm that occupier thinks of during the window when their requirement becomes real, which may fall anywhere from twelve to thirty-six months after the first contact was made. Marketing here is a long positioning exercise measured on an event the advertiser neither controls nor can accelerate, and every conventional metric assumes the opposite of that.

It also explains why inquiry-based measurement is close to useless in this segment rather than merely imprecise. An inquiry from an occupier with three years remaining on their lease is worth almost nothing this year and possibly a very great deal in two, and there is no way to tell the two apart from the inquiry itself. Matching completed leases back to the first contact, whenever that contact happened to occur, is the only mechanism that shows which sources were reaching occupiers at the point their lease events actually arrived.

A business that moves once will move again. It will also renew, expand into the floor above when it hires, take a second site in another city, dispose of surplus space through an assignment or a sublease when it contracts, and eventually consolidate the whole thing back into one building. A tenant representation firm that handles the first transaction well is positioned for every one of those, and for the portfolio and advisory work that comes with being the incumbent on a national account.

That makes the value of winning an occupier considerably larger than the commission on the first deal, and it accrues across a period no annual report captures. A channel that produced a single modest lease four years ago may since have generated three further transactions, a lease restructure and a rolling advisory relationship, all of which are logged in the deal tracker against the occupier's name and none of which are connected to the campaign that started the relationship. The tracker knows; the marketing report has never been told.

Uploading several years of completed deals against the inquiry history attaches every later transaction to the source that produced the relationship in the first place, without anybody reconstructing it from memory. For a firm deciding how much a new occupier relationship is worth acquiring, and therefore what it can afford to spend to win one, that lifetime figure is the number the decision genuinely turns on. It is substantially larger than the first commission that any single-year report would ever show, which is why the budget has probably been set too low.

Firms in this market acquire clients with research. A quarterly rent and availability report, a fit-out cost guide, a piece on hybrid working and how much space a given headcount actually needs, a submarket review with a rent forecast attached. These are produced at real expense by people who could otherwise be broking, they are gated behind a form asking for a name and a work email address, and they are judged on downloads, because downloads are the one thing the marketing platform is able to count.

A download is a person who wanted a number, and the large majority of them are not in the market and never will be. Analysts, landlords, competitors checking what you are telling their tenants, students, consultants and occupiers with four years left on their lease all download precisely the same document. They are indistinguishable in the report from the one facility manager whose break clause falls next spring. Judging the research program on volume therefore rewards whichever title gets shared most widely, which is very rarely the one that reaches people who can sign anything.

The download list is exactly the sort of file that belongs in the lead file, tagged with the publication, with names and work email addresses already captured by the gate the firm put there deliberately. Completed leases are then matched back to it, so each publication is ranked on the commission it eventually produced rather than on how many copies went out of the door. That comparison may show an unglamorous piece of research, perhaps the least discussed internally, outperforming far more visible work.