Why this matters
Commercial real estate has no single complete marketplace — many small commercial spaces never reach the major listing sites at all. Search one channel and you're choosing from a fraction of the real inventory.
What "done" looks like
- A tenant-rep broker engaged for your area
- Saved searches with alerts on the major listing platforms
- The target area driven or walked, every "For Lease" sign logged
- One tracking sheet with every candidate space and its status
How to do it
- Engage a tenant-rep broker who works your area — in most US markets their fee comes out of the landlord's commission.
- Set alerts on listing platforms — LoopNet and Crexi are the big national commercial sites; add your market's local broker sites.
- Drive the target blocks at least twice — small landlords still lease with a sign in the window and nothing online.
- Ask the network — nearby business owners, the chamber of commerce, and suppliers often hear about spaces before they list.
- Log everything in one sheet — address, size, rent, contact, status — so channels compound.
Common mistakes
- Treating LoopNet as the whole market and concluding "nothing's available"
- Skipping the broker to "save money" that mostly wasn't yours to save
- Finding a great space and losing it for lack of tracking and fast follow-up
Real-world examples
- LoopNet and Crexi are the dominant national online commercial listing marketplaces, but they skew toward larger brokered spaces, so on-the-ground searches still surface inventory the internet misses.
- Off-market outreach is standard among experienced operators: small-landlord vacancies often circulate by word of mouth before they ever list.
From a founder's point of view
Location searching rewards process over luck. The channels barely overlap, so each one skipped removes real options — and the space you never saw doesn't feel like a loss, which is exactly why founders under-search. Run it like a sales pipeline, not a shopping trip.
Rule of thumb
If your candidate list has fewer than ten spaces from at least three different channels, you haven't searched the market — you've sampled it.