Choosing the best-known advisory brand is a rational move, because it protects the person making the decision. It is simply worth knowing that what you are buying is peace of mind, not necessarily a better result. Nor do you have to take the risk of a conflict of interest on faith: just ask how many buildings on your shortlist the firm works on for the landlord, and who pays for the transaction.
In the 1970s, IT departments had a saying: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. No one knows who coined it. The phrase simply stuck, and it is still with us today.
Notice what it leaves out. There is not a word about IBM being the best, or being cheap. All it says is that the person who chose it was safe. If the project succeeded, they had chosen well. If it failed, well, never mind: they had gone with the biggest name on the market.
Office leasing works exactly the same way
Only the stakes are higher. Rent is usually the second or third largest cost line in a services business. The decision is made once every five years, on incomplete information and usually in a hurry, and its consequences play out over sixty months.
And the person choosing the advisor is almost never the person who later has to explain to the board why office costs have gone up. A worse decision gets diluted over time and lost in someone else’s budget. A decision that looks bad in the meeting hurts straight away.
That is why I do not blame anyone for going with the best-known brand. It is rational behaviour. It is just worth knowing that what you are buying is peace of mind, not necessarily a better result.
Two models, not two lists of names
Let us set the names aside, because names have nothing to do with it. What matters is the model, and there are two on the market. In the first, the same firm advises both landlords and tenants in a given city. In the second, it advises tenants only. This is not an accusation aimed at anyone. It is a description of a structure, and structure is not a matter of good intentions.
Two questions to ask before the pitch
Who pays for this transaction
In Poland, the tenant advisor’s fee is most often paid by the landlord and sits in the landlord’s budget whether or not you use an advisor. If you do not, that money stays on the other side of the table. This is worth knowing, because many tenants forgo an advisor in the belief that they are saving money.
Do you also work for landlords in this city
Not globally, and not in a statement on your website, but here and in this segment. The answer is yes or no, and the rest of the conversation depends on it.
What is not obvious at first glance
A large international advisory firm is not a tenant firm that happens to serve landlords on the side. Just look at its list of services: property management, leasing space on behalf of landlords, valuations, investment advisory, capital markets. The tenant is one of its clients, not the client. Most of its business lines face the other side of the table.
This is not about the integrity of the people you are talking to. They are usually decent and know their stuff. It is about scale. An organisation of that size cannot avoid close relationships with landlords, because they are the source of the core of its revenue. Nobody in Poland builds a firm of several hundred people on tenant representation alone.
This risk can be measured
There is no need either to take it on faith or to dismiss it out of hand.
Ask directly how many buildings on your shortlist the firm works on for the landlord, whether in leasing or in management. Ask what share of the office stock in your city it represents.
If the answer is “none” or “one in ten”, the matter is settled and you can get on with the work. If it is “six in ten”, that does not mean anyone is going to cheat you. It means that your advisor sits down to negotiate with people with whom they have other, bigger and longer-term business than your one lease. And they will still have it after you have signed.
An advisor who would like to win a mandate from that landlord to lease up a building next year has limited appetite today for souring the relationship over your lease amendment.
Scale comes at a price
The point is not that scale is bad. Large firms have data, reach and depth of team that a smaller player does not, and for a strategy spanning a dozen or more countries that can outweigh everything else. The point is that scale has a price, and it is better to estimate it than to assume there is none.
What really protects the decision-maker
It cannot be bought together with a brand. It is a memo showing that the options were compared, specific questions were asked and the choice was made deliberately. Plus a fully worked-out effective rent for both scenarios.
Anyone who has these two things does not need someone else’s logo as justification, because they have their own numbers.
I explain how to calculate effective rent, and what else besides the headline rate drives the cost of an office, in our guide to negotiating an office lease in 2026. We have written separately about who pays whom in this market: who pays the advisor in the office market. And the conflict-free way of working itself is described in our article on tenant representation versus the landlord’s agent.
Brookfield Partners advises tenants only and does not accept mandates from landlords. We are a member of Exis Global, an international network of advisors working on this model. This article describes a mechanism, not specific firms.
