BOSTON — SVN International Corp. (SVN), a commercial real estate franchisor of the SVN® brand, has released a new report containing definitive data supporting the pricing advantage of cooperation in commercial real estate transactions.
The SVN Cooperation Report contains the findings of a recent survey of approximately 15,000 commercial transactions over a 10 year time period and establishes that cooperatively sold properties achieve an average price per square foot that is 9.6 percent higher than that of properties sold with only a single brokerage firm involved in the transaction.
Key SVN Cooperation Report takeaways:
• Brokers who cooperate drive more competition among multiple buyer pools, leading to an asset selling by a higher price of up to 9.6 percent more per square foot.
• The impact of broker cooperation varied by product type; with industrial properties enjoying the lowest benefit while multifamily assets received the greatest price increase from cooperative brokerage practices.
• Cooperation also led to higher overall selling prices and lower capitalization rates.
Authored by SVN EVP of Organizational Development, Solomon Poretsky, the Cooperation Report was completed with the help of an international team of real estate executives, researchers and academics who pulled approximately 15,000 sale records spanning 2006 to 2015 and covered the four core building types—industrial, multifamily, office and retail. They included transactions between $2.5 million and $20 million that had at least one brokerage firm involved. The 10 states surveyed included large ones like California and small markets like Oklahoma, “boom” markets like Arizona and stable markets like Ohio, giving the survey an accurate cross section of the United States.
“The most important part of this report is the industry has proof to support that cooperation is the best way of doing brokerage. The findings are definitive: cooperation drives results,” says Poretsky. “Allowing every broker in the market to compete to bring buyers drives prices upwards, and it does this by an amount that is, on average, significantly higher than the cost of paying a full brokerage fee.”
SVN’s report proves that cooperation works and, furthermore, that it works everywhere. The average price per square foot was higher in every asset class. Office buildings sold for 6.1 percent more, industrial properties sold for 9.3 percent more, retail properties achieved prices that were 9.6 percent higher on average and apartment buildings that were sold with different brokers on each side of the transaction achieved an 18.4 percent price per square foot delta.
“The ideal that broker cooperation increases value is one of SVN’s founding principles, but it has never been supported by raw data until now,” says SVN President and CEO Kevin Maggiacomo. “The Cooperation Study proves that the SVN platform, a culture built on broker collaboration, truly is a platform where everyone wins…especially clients.”
