Cold email by industry · commercial real estate
Cold email for commercial real estate firms
Commercial property is a dated business. Every tenant has a lease end, every landlord has a vacancy horizon, and both are effectively unreachable outside a window around those dates. The whole discipline of CRE outbound is knowing the date and arriving about nine months before it.
Who you are actually selling to
- Head of Facilities / Workplace
- Owns the lease and the move. The primary target for tenant representation.
- Finance Director
- Signs the lease and cares about the balance-sheet treatment. Good second contact, poor first.
- Founder / MD
- At companies under about 150, where the property decision is made personally and emotionally.
The trigger worth waiting for
A lease expiry roughly nine to twelve months out, a headcount change large enough to break the current footprint, a planning application, or a funding round. Lease data is commercially available in most developed markets and is the backbone of serious CRE prospecting.
What works
- +Leading with the date. "Your Sint-Katelijne lease runs to March 2027" proves the research instantly.
- +Market data specific to their building or street, not the city.
- +Offering an options paper rather than a viewing. It is a lower-commitment first step.
- +Persistence across quarters. The person who ignored you in month twelve replies in month nine.
What fails
- −Untargeted landlord and tenant blasts, which is most of what this industry sends.
- −"Do you have any property requirements?" — a question with no cost to ignore.
- −Approaching in the last three months of a lease, when the decision is already made and you are competing on panic.
A worked opener
Subject
March 2027 — Sint-Katelijne
Body
Your lease on the Sint-Katelijnevest floor runs to March 2027, which means the useful decision window is roughly now. Two comparable floors within 400m have let this quarter at meaningfully below your current passing rent, and one landlord on that street is unusually motivated. I have put the three realistic options on one page. Want it?
Why it works: The date does the work — it demonstrates real research, creates urgency the reader already believes, and the ask is a page, not a viewing.
Compliance notes
B2B and low-risk. Watch accuracy: lease and rent data is often slightly stale, and being wrong about a prospect's own lease terms is an unrecoverable first impression. Hedge where the data is uncertain rather than asserting.
Questions
- How far ahead of a lease expiry should I make contact?
- Nine to twelve months for a straightforward relocation, and eighteen or more for anything requiring fit-out or planning. Approach in the final quarter and you arrive after the decision, competing only on price.
- Where does lease expiry data come from?
- Commercial property databases carry it in most developed markets, alongside land registry filings and planning applications. It is the single highest-value targeting input in this vertical — without it, CRE outbound is guesswork.
Have the agents do this for you
Everything on this page is what a good commercial real estate campaign needs someone to work out. Pipestork works it out from your website — the profile, the companies, the decision-makers, the sequences — and sends from warmed mailboxes, not your domain.
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