You’ll find vacant units sitting empty in every market, not because the location is poor, but because no one can figure out what to do with the space. A raw shell is hard to sell — it’s why home staging is a bustling business. Hiring a stager to set up a home helps prospective buyers envision themselves living there.
The same holds true for commercial real estate spaces. Most prospective tenants don’t have the imagination, time, or, honestly, the architectural literacy to look at bare concrete and exposed conduit and see their future office, clinic, or storefront.
Landlords have begun to close that gap with a less expensive, faster move than a full build-out: paying for photorealistic renderings of what the space could become, and inviting the tenant to pick from a tiered menu of how much of that vision they want built.
What pre-speccing is (and isn’t)
This scenario sits in a specific market gap. On one end, you have the fully built spec suite — a move-in-ready office that the landlord constructs speculatively, sans client, hoping it leases faster. On the other end, you have a bare shell and a tenant improvement allowance — the traditional approach. What’s becoming popular now? The middle path. Skip the construction (initially) but pay for the vision.
Using tools like Matterport-based virtual staging or AI-driven rendering platforms, landlords and brokers can digitally furnish and finish a vacant space, showing a prospect exactly how it could look as a tech office, boutique retail shop, or medical suite, without touching a stud.
One platform in this space said staging costs around $1-2 per square foot, compared to $50-120 per square foot for actual physical build-out. Some vendors claim that spaces using this kind of visualization lease 3-4 months more quickly and command rent premiums of 10-21% over comparable unstaged vacancies.
A caveat: These numbers come from vendor marketing, as independent research is pending, so treat them as directional rather than gospel.
Once a tenant finds a rendering they like, enter the tiered package. The landlord can offer a few defined buildout levels — a basic finish, a mid-tier package matching what was rendered, and a premium version with upgraded materials — and the tenant can choose, based on their budget and timeline. This approach turns an open-ended, stress-inducing negotiation into something that feels akin to ordering from a menu.
Why the trend is catching on now
A few forces are converging here. Construction costs have shrunk traditional TI allowances, which is partly what’s fueling the broader spec site boom in the first place. Tenants, especially smaller companies lacking an in-house facilities team, are increasingly unwilling to manage a months-long design-and-construction process in addition to all the other logistics involved in relocating a business.
And realistically speaking, most tenants have a hard time visualizing an unfinished space and lack the time or desire to run a full design process themselves. A rendering solves the visualization problem without the landlord committing capital to a suite that may not match what the eventual tenant wants anyway.
Best practices for landlords and brokers
A few things separate a pre-specced pitch that converts from one that looks nice in an email blast:
- Show more than one use case for the same space. One generic rendering undersells a space’s flexibility. Showing the same square footage staged as an open-plan tech office and a more traditional professional services layout invites different prospects to self-select a vision that fits them.
- Specify in detail what’s rendered vs. what’s real. Nothing destroys trust faster than a tenant who enters a space that looks nothing like the glossy online rendering that initially piqued their interest. Pair the visuals with finish samples, material boards, or a nearby completed unit for hands-on exploration.
- Keep the tiers simple and priced up front. Three clearly labeled tiers with a detailed explanation of what each level offers (flooring grade, lighting package, private office count, etc.) remove friction from what’s often the slowest part of a lease negotiation.
- Use the rendering as a floor-plan tool (don’t just make it eye candy). The most effective renderings double as functional test-fits, showing capacity, workflow, and adjacencies alongside the finishes and other bells and whistles, so prospects can evaluate whether the space aligns with their headcount and operational requirements.
- Turn it around fast. Part of this trend’s appeal is its speed. Vendors in this space typically promise a 24-48-hour turnaround for staged visuals — key if you’re trying to keep a prospect engaged and not lose them to a slow decision cycle.
Which sectors love the pre-spec trend?
This trend has gained the most momentum in office leasing right now, as it’s riding the broader spec suite wave. It works well because most office tenants have somewhat similar, easily reconfigurable needs: desks, private offices, a conference room or two, and some communal space. Retail and restaurant spaces are a close second, since a prospective tenant trying to picture a raw box as their future café or boutique benefits enormously from seeing it staged with actual merchandising or seating layouts.
Healthcare is the more interesting case — and it’s not a clean yes. Medical tenants do respond well to seeing a rendered version of their future space, but for this group, aesthetics don’t contribute to the bottleneck. Medical build-outs involve specialized infrastructure, additional plumbing, medical gas lines, higher electrical capacity, ADA-specific layouts, etc., that a generic, attractive rendering can’t solve for.
Medical tenants often also sign longer leases (typically 7-10 years) and most bring their own architect with healthcare-specific experience rather than working with a landlord’s off-the-shelf version. A rendering can help a landlord market a former retail box as a viable medical conversion and tempt a physician group to walk through the door. However, closing the deal depends more on whether the landlord can credibly show that the space is infrastructure-ready, with the right plumbing and power, than on how nice the finishes look in a render.
The takeaway
For a landlord or broker sitting on a unit that’s been hard to move, pre-speccing the pace offers a low-cost way to test whether the problem is the space itself or the story it tells. A few thousand dollars in renderings and a clearly tiered buildout menu requires far fewer financial resources than committing to a full-speculative buildout, and it gives prospects something raw shells don’t provide: a reason to say yes without having to imagine it themselves first.
Are you a commercial real estate investor or seeking a specific property to meet your company’s needs? We invite you to talk to the professionals at CREA United, an organization of CRE professionals from over 65 firms representing all disciplines within the CRE industry, from brokers to subcontractors, financial services to security systems, interior designers to architects, movers to IT, and more.
