The service gap that quietly damages client relationships.

CRE Success Principle: Clients don’t judge you by the quality of your marketing or the warmth of your check-in emails. They judge you by whether what you deliver matches the promises you have made.

One of the biggest risks in commercial real estate is the gap between how your business presents itself publicly and how clients actually experience working with you.

Recently, I experienced this firsthand after appointing a commercial property buyer’s agent to help source investment opportunities. Their branding was good. Their marketing was polished. Their online presence consistently showcased successful deals and happy clients.

But behind the scenes, the actual client experience was way off the mark.

The Appearance of Service

Over nine months, I received very few suitable opportunities despite having a clear investment brief, funding ready to go, and strong motivation to transact.

What frustrated me most was not just the lack of results. It was the appearance of activity replacing genuine service. Generic check-in emails and recycled opportunities are not relationship management. Clients can feel the difference.

Your Quiet Clients Are the Risk

Most clients will not immediately complain when service slips. They stay patient. They give you the benefit of the doubt. But patience eventually runs out.

In many commercial real estate businesses, attention naturally shifts toward the loudest clients while quieter relationships slowly weaken in the background.

That creates a dangerous blind spot for commercial real estate principals.

Escalation Is an Opportunity

Once I clearly pushed back, things changed quickly. Communication improved, opportunities increased, and a deal is now moving toward settlement.

Handled properly, client complaints can strengthen trust instead of destroying it.

If you want to build stronger client relationships and avoid silent loyalty erosion, listen to episode 270 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. 

Episode transcript:

At the start of this year, I received a check-in email from my commercial buyer's agent.

Part of the email read, “As the year begins, we wanted to reach out and reassure you that you're still on our radar as a high priority.”

They then listed my requirements, which I'd given them many times, and they'd still managed to recount incorrectly.

Then they concluded the email by saying, “We remain on your side and actively engaged in sourcing strong opportunities for you.”

Now, it was a well-written email. It was professional, it was warm, and it made me absolutely furious because of the gap between what it said and what I'd been experiencing as a client.

You see, at that point, I'd been a client for nine months. And in nine months I'd received four opportunities, four deals to consider, none of which resulted in a transaction or even got close, and most of which I could pick apart after just one or two minutes of looking at them.

That email, which I could tell also was an email that they had just scheduled for all of their clients to be sent at 8:00 a.m. on the first working day of the year on the 12th of January, which was a Monday, it told me everything that I needed to know about the gap that existed between what they say and the reality of what they were doing.

And today, I want to tell you the full story because I think there are some lessons in that that are directly relevant for how you are running your commercial real estate business right now.

This is episode 270 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak. I'm here to help you lead better, grow faster, and stress less.

And before we get into today's episode, if you've got an idea for an episode or if you've got some feedback about the content that we've shared on this, today's episode, or a recent episode, just like we shared a bit of feedback from Mick a couple of episodes ago, just send me a DM on LinkedIn. I would absolutely love to hear from you.

So today, I want to talk about something that I mentioned a couple of episodes ago about my commercial buyer's agent that I had some issues with, and I appointed them back in May 2025.

And you may be wondering, hang on, why are you hiring a commercial buyer's agent? You are someone who's supposed to know about commercial real estate.

Well, I didn't hire them because I couldn't do it myself. I hired them because I'm busy, and I also wanted the accountability of someone presenting me with opportunities with deal flow, so I could then act on it.

I'd done the work of drawing down equity from other investments. I'd set up the structure to purchase it within, and I wanted to make sure that I followed through.

I had a really clear investment brief. I paid 5,000 bucks engagement fee, which is pretty standard.

And my thinking was that they would then keep up their end of the bargain and start introducing opportunities to me.

Now, I was not a vague client. I was not indecisive. I was ready to go. I was funded, and I had specific criteria and a genuine appetite to buy.

Now, I'm telling you all of that context because I want to be clear about where things were starting.

And this was not a complicated brief. And I, again, I was not a difficult client. I was probably the exact type of client that a buyer's agent should want, someone who knew what they wanted and was highly motivated to get a deal done.

Now, I mentioned at the top of the show, in the first nine months, four opportunities were presented to me.

The first opportunity arrived the day after I appointed this firm. And you might think, "Well, that's, that's impressive, right?"

Well, it sounds impressive until you realize what it actually was. It was a deal that another client had given away after going through DD, so they were shopping it around.

And when the first thing that you receive is something that someone else didn't want, and it didn't meet my investment criteria, by the way, it sort of makes you think, "Hmm, okay. Well, I hope things get better from here."

Well, the second opportunity I got was an absolute dog. It didn't meet my investment criteria, and it was sent to me anyway, and it was, like, objectively a terrible property.

And this raises the question that I think every commercial real estate principal should ask about their business.

When your team sends a client something that doesn't fit their brief, is it because they don't understand the brief, or is it because they're just trying to show some level of activity?

I think, the quality of the opportunity was so bad it made me ask, "Is this what they really think a good investment looks like?"

So we now get into the third opportunity that they sent me, and in this case, it looked pretty good on the surface.

But when I looked more closely, I found some things that I believe should have been disclosed to me upfront if I'm engaging a buyer's agent to represent my interest.

The vendor of this particular property also owned all of the surrounding properties. They just carved them up, and the first one they were selling off was this particular one.

The tenant was vacating from all of the properties around that property with the same vendor at the end of the lease, which they knew.

That's not a minor detail. That's significant, and that changes the entire investment thesis, in my opinion, and it hadn't been mentioned at all.

Now, I raised this with them, and they said it wasn't relevant and there was nothing for them to disclose. I really did not like that answer.

And I sort of let them know that I disagreed, but at that stage I thought, you know, we're only three months into this, let's just put it down to a difference of opinion and see where we get to.

Well, I only got one more opportunity sent to me in 2025, and it was a pretty good opportunity, I've got to say.

It was also off market, which is exactly the type of thing that you're paying a buyer's agent to bring you.

The problem was, is that the vendor wasn't exactly engaged in the process. They didn't respond to our offer, so in practical terms, it wasn't really an opportunity because I don't know if the vendor ever really was serious about selling.

I don't know what was going on behind the scenes between the selling agent or the agent who wasn't appointed but was trying to make a deal happen and the buyer's agent, but it just kind of felt like a placeholder to placate me, to give me a sense that there was something going on.

So, four options I received in the first nine months, and that includes a period of six months with only one opportunity that wasn't really for sale as far as I can tell.

Now, I know that commercial property acquisition takes time, and that the right deal doesn't necessarily come quickly, especially in the market that we've been in over the past twelve months.

But I'm also experienced enough to know the difference between a difficult market and when I am not getting what I paid for.

And in my opinion, they did absolutely nothing to reconcile that difference.

And while all of this was happening, something was going on in the background while I was waiting, while I was receiving these off-brief and underdeveloped opportunities that was impossible to ignore.

I was seeing all of their content marketing online consistently on Instagram, on LinkedIn, very well-produced, professional, all of the time. It included tons of results they'd achieved for other clients.

Now, my first reaction when I was seeing these bits of content was frustration.

Why are they working so hard on content? Why are they working so hard for other clients? And why are they doing so little to fill my brief?

But my second reaction was probably more important. I realized that they just weren't incompetent. They clearly had the capability to show up consistently to do quality work.

And you know, if I'd appointed an incompetent buyer's agent, shame on me for doing so. But they're not incompetent. They were putting themselves forward. Their branding and content work and marketing was excellent, and they were producing results for other clients.

So, what was really going on was they just hadn't prioritized me.

So this is kind of like a brand service gap, and it's the distance between how professionally a business represents itself publicly and how it actually treats its clients who are actually in the door.

If you're a commercial real estate principal, for you to sit with this question. Are you more consistent with your content than you are with your client communication?

Now, I think it's the opposite problem in commercial real estate agency. Most of you are far more consistent with the way that you communicate and deliver to your clients than you are with your content.

But if that is you, you better believe that your clients are probably going to notice.

And if they have noticed, there's a good chance that they haven't told you about it, but it's just silently ticking them off as it was ticking me off.

So why didn't I just leave? Why didn't I just go somewhere else? Well, there was something else going on, and I want to be transparent about this.

I raised the issue on that third deal about where I thought some disclosures should have been made, and I thought about walking away then, but there was this $5,000 engagement fee that was a factor, and that's pretty standard in the industry.

And just walking away from it or, you know, having the confrontational discussion with them about getting it back added a bit of friction to the decision to just walk away and terminate the relationship.

But I think what's interesting about that friction is that the deposit is designed to protect them to make sure that they're collecting some money up front, but it also protected me.

Because rather than just quietly moving on, which is what a lot of dissatisfied clients do, I was invested enough to stay in the process and compel them to change.

So that's a bit of a commitment paradox, right? Engagement fees are usually framed as a protection for the business, and they are, but they're also there to show that a client is committed.

And a client who has paid to engage you is also more likely to tell you when things aren't working rather than simply leave because they've already got something in the bag in terms of what they've put into it financially.

And that's an asset for a business if you create the conditions for that conversation to happen.

And speaking in traditional agency terms, I think while most vendors don't pay engagement fees on campaigns, they do spend a lot on VPA up front, right? So, there's something similar going on in your business.

And the question for you might be, when a client pushes back, are you ready to respond in a way that makes them glad that they stayed?

So back to the start of the episode. I talked about that check-in email from the start of the year that really kind of was the trigger for me raising significant complaints.

And it was a trigger not because it was the worst thing that had happened, but because it crystallized in my mind that I could no longer ignore this.

The gap between the language they were using to describe our relationship and the actual experience I was having had become too wide, and I decided I was done with being patient.

One of my friends told me the squeaky wheel gets the most attention, but I didn't just squeak.

I made my dissatisfaction completely unambiguous. I can laugh about it now, but, um, you know, I was clearly angry.

I didn't yell, I didn't swear, but they knew I was angry. I was just really specific when I spoke to them. I referenced the deals, the timeline, the undisclosed particulars, the inconsistency between their marketing and my experience as a client and how that made me feel.

The fact that there was just a genuine lack of opportunity and no clear evidence of proper work being done on their part.

And I made it clear that this is not just some routine complaint. I was complaining about their failures in the clearest possible way.

Now, when I initially made that complaint, they scrambled and they tried to fix it immediately.

But then I called them out and I said, "This is not something you can fix in five minutes. This is something that needs to be reviewed carefully, and I want to know what you're going to do about it. I want you to go away, find out why it happened, and I want you to come back and I want you to show me that I'm going to be a top priority for you moving forward."

And I remember I said, "I don't just want to be a priority. I want to be top priority, because that's my expectation moving forward."

And here's what they did. They went away for a few days. They scheduled a call with me, and they came back to me quite comprehensively.

And by then they'd stopped deflecting. They weren't making too many excuses.

They did reference the fact that they've just got too many briefs and that the market's difficult, but that's not really my problem. Maybe they should take on less briefs if they can't service them.

It also made me question why they do so much marketing if their excuse for not servicing briefs is, "We've got too many briefs."

But, you know, I guess that's neither here or there. It was, I'm not as a client there to tell them how to run their business, but I did notice that.

So just keep that in mind when you're giving excuses to your clients. I just wanted them to do right by me.

Now, they acknowledged fully that what they had been delivering was not good enough, and they promised that I would see a change.

It was uncomfortable conversation. I let them know that I found it uncomfortable.

And I think the uncomfortableness that I felt will tell you something about how a client is feeling when they push back on you, even when they're in the right.

So within one month of that conversation, which was in February, I'd received the same number of genuine opportunities as I'd received in the previous nine months combined.

That is, within one month of that conversation happening, I'd received four opportunities, and three out of four of them were suitable. One of them I, I didn't really like.

So, I submitted an offer on the fourth one, and due diligence has been completed the other day, and we're just finalizing the finance approvals right now.

And by the time this episode airs, I think that the deal will be unconditional.

So, this was a big turnaround, right? And what had changed is just that they were putting a higher priority on getting me a result.

Clearly, before I was a low priority. I'd fallen between the cracks, but suddenly I was a high priority. Maybe not their top priority as I demanded, but certainly I could sense and I could see that I was on their radar.

And I think a question that you can ask as a business owner is, which of your clients is moving up your priority list because they push back? And which are the other ones that are just sitting there quietly because they haven't? And do you need to maybe look at the opportunity to make those quiet clients a little bit more of a higher priority?

I think there's a dynamic in play in every agency that, you know, we don't really talk about very much. Let's call it the squeaky wheel premium.

Attention is a finite resource, and in any business it gets allocated consciously or not. And the reality is that it rarely goes to clients who deserve it the most.

It goes to the clients who ask for it the loudest, who are the most visibly active, or who create consequences when they don't get the attention that they want.

Now, this means that your most professional, your most patient, your most loyal clients, and often your best clients, could be systematically receiving less proactive service than the ones who make the most noise.

Not because anyone's decided that they should get less, but because no one actively decided otherwise.

I was patient for nine months. The moment I stopped being patient and I started advocating for myself as a client, I became a top priority, and I gave them the opportunity to do right by me.

Now, I shouldn't have had to do that, and your clients shouldn't have to do that either.

So, I just want to share three lessons from my experience with this particular buyer's agent.

The first one is that the appearance of service is not service. So, a check-in email is not relationship management. Telling a client they're top of mind while sending them recycled off-brief opportunities, that's not service. That's the performance of service. And your clients can see the difference even when they don't say it.

Second lesson is your quietest clients are often your most exposed relationships, and we touched a little bit on this last week. Clients who don't complain are not your most satisfied clients. They are often your most patient ones, but patience has a limit.

You need a proactive system for these relationships, one that doesn't depend on them raising their hand before you decide to pay attention.

And lesson three is escalation when handled well can strengthen a relationship. And this is the kind of counterintuitive one, because a client who pushes back hard and makes a lot of noise and receives a genuine response can be brought back into the tent because they've now got evidence that the relationship is real and that it matters.

The failure isn't being challenged. The failure is not rising to the challenge.

So just to be clear, I'm not telling you this story to give myself a pat on the back for fighting to get what I was paying for or to tell you about this deal that's about to close.

I'm telling you about it because I think most commercial real estate principals listening will recognize something in it, either as the client or hopefully more importantly for your business.

Last week I told you about the residential property manager that I left after seven years after I was ignored and there were more issues. I stopped escalating and I just left.

The friction was low and the decision was easy.

This time, because of that $5,000 engagement fee, the friction was higher but I chose to push back instead of walking away and the outcome is looking like it will be a good one.

But the lessons across both of the stories is pretty clear, right?

Your clients are moving through that curve long before they tell you anything, the loyalty erosion curve that I mentioned last week.

The ones that leave quietly have moved through it and the ones who push back hard like I did in this particular case are doing you a favor because at least they're giving you the chance to fix it.

The question is whether your business is built to notice the quiet ones before it's too late or whether you're depending on your clients to do the hard work of saving the relationship for you.

That's our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening and I will speak to you soon.