Your office space is not leasing. Here is what to change.

The listing has been up for months. Tours are thin, and the ones that happen do not convert. The obvious lever is the asking rate, and it is the wrong one to pull first, because a rate cut is permanent and it does not address why nobody is calling.

Office is the asset class where what tenants want changed most and where marketing changed least. Most office listings still lead with the same three facts they led with in 2015: rentable square feet, floor plate, asking rate.

Nobody is shopping for square footage

A tenant signing office space in 2026 is solving one problem: will our people actually come in. Every other criterion is downstream of that.

Which reorders what matters. Light and air, because a dim interior floor is where attendance goes to die. The commute, because it is now compared against staying home. What is within a five-minute walk, because lunch and coffee are part of the reason to be in a building. Whether the building feels occupied, because nobody wants to be the only tenant on a quiet floor.

Almost none of that is legible from rentable area and a floor plate. It is why a listing can be priced correctly and still generate no calls.

Empty offices photograph badly, and they should

An empty office floor is genuinely hard to sell in stills. Grey carpet, white walls, ceiling grid, and a window that the camera exposes as a blown-out rectangle. Every vacant floor in your submarket photographs identically, which means photos give a tenant no basis to choose you.

Two things change that. The first is showing the space in motion rather than in frames. Moving toward a window shows how deep the light actually reaches, which is the single most common question about an interior floor and one a static photo systematically misrepresents.

The second is showing the context. An aerial move that establishes where the building sits relative to transit and the walkable blocks around it answers the commute and the lunch question in a few seconds. Both come from photos and a site plan you already have, with drone-style flyovers included on every paid Slungshots video.

Diagnose before you discount

Read which of three patterns you have, because they have different fixes.

Few inquiries at all. A reach and packaging problem. The listing is not getting in front of the right tenants, or it is and it is not saying anything. Cutting the rate here sells the space cheaper to the same audience that already ignored it.

Tours that do not convert. A product problem. Something about the space in person is worse than the listing implied. Condition, layout, the lobby, the neighboring vacancy. Marketing cannot fix this and marketing harder makes it worse, because you are spending money to show more people the thing that is losing.

Serious tenants stalling on economics. Now it is genuinely the rate, or the TI package, or the term. This is the only pattern where the price move is the right first move.

Give tenants a date instead of a project

The most effective non-price lever in office is usually spec suites. A tenant comparing a shell against a finished suite is comparing a design-permit-build project with an uncertain cost against a space they can occupy on a known date.

For a growing company, that certainty is often worth more than a few dollars a foot. And a finished suite finally gives you something to show that does not look like every other grey floor in the market.

What to change this month

Before touching the rate, change what a tenant sees in the first thirty seconds. Lead with the location and the light rather than the square footage. Show the space moving so the light reads honestly. Show the walk to transit and to lunch.

Then look at your inquiry pattern honestly and act on the one you actually have. For the wider sequence on working a listing from launch through the day-45 refresh, see how to market a commercial property.