By KeyCrew Media
A property owner rarely wakes up one day and decides to sell out of nowhere. Usually, something in the background changes first. A lease is ending. A loan is coming due. A rent step-up is about to kick in. Brokers who know how to read those signals get to the owner before anyone else does. Brokers who do not are stuck waiting for a listing to show up.
According to Dan Mosher, co-founder and CEO of DealGround, an AI-powered commercial real estate intelligence platform, lease timing is one of the clearest and most underused signals in the business.
The signal hiding in the lease
“There’s a certain set of data points that are good selling signals. One we like is a tenant that has a lease coming due. The owner doesn’t necessarily want to deal with a renegotiation, an extension, or finding a new tenant,” Mosher said. “Anything having to do with the tenant situation and the lease situation are typically good data points that tell you there might be an interest in selling.”
A rent increase built into the lease can point to the same opportunity, just from a different angle.
“A lot of owners, when you’re marketing a property, you’re marketing it against the current cash flow of the asset. If you know your cash flow is about to go from $100,000 a year in rent to $110,000 a year, you might want to market it and sell it right as that step up is occurring, because then you’re going to benefit from that new cash flow number,” Mosher said.
Timing the outreach
Spotting the signal is only half the job. Reaching out at the right moment matters just as much, and Mosher is specific about the window.
“I’d say 12 months is a good timeline. If I’ve got a lease that’s maturing in August of 2027, this is probably a good time to have a conversation with an owner about that, because they may already be in the process of renegotiating with their tenant,” Mosher said. “You don’t want to be too early, but you also don’t want to be too late, because maybe somebody else will have knifed in and grabbed that opportunity.”
That six to twelve month window gives a broker enough runway to have a real conversation, pitch the owner, and take the property to market before a competing broker gets there first.
Why this signal gets overlooked
If lease expiration data is this useful, the obvious question is why more brokers are not already using it. Mosher does not think brokers were ever blocked from it. The problem is scale.
“Nothing has really stopped brokers from using this kind of data. I think the good brokers had a lot of this in their brains,” Mosher said. “But it gets impossible to remember all this stuff. The manual approach sort of breaks down when you have volume, and up until this point, there’s been no system to categorize and catalog all this stuff.”
A broker tracking five or ten relationships can keep lease dates in their head. A broker tracking hundreds of properties cannot, and that is exactly where the signal gets lost. There’s been no system to categorize and catalog all this data.
Platforms built to monitor this kind of data continuously, rather than relying on memory or static spreadsheets, are designed to close that gap. More detail on how lease and financing signals are tracked is available on DealGround’s resources page.
For brokers still waiting for listings to appear, lease expiration data offers a way to have the conversation months before a property ever reaches the market.
About DealGround
DealGround is an AI-powered intelligence command center for commercial real estate (CRE) professionals. The platform transforms fragmented property, tenant, ownership, and market data into structured, actionable deal intelligence that helps brokers convert insights into opportunity. Built for how brokers actually work, DealGround brings together property intelligence and ownership research to help brokers generate qualified leads and move faster from prospecting to closed deals. DealGround serves the top 15 CRE brokerage firms nationwide. For more information, visit www.dealground.com.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
