Beyond Leverage: Three Negotiation Takeaways for CRE Professionals

By Brielle Scott | September 9, 2025

 

“I don’t come to this with 30 years of experience. There were people on my flight here that have forgotten more about negotiation than I’ve learned,” joked Ryan Smith, senior associate for Trammell Crow Company, in a session this week at CRE.Converge.

Smith, who works in TCC’s life science development team in Atlanta, shared some key negotiating lessons learned through Science Square, a project he’s worked on for the past three years. The innovation district is a partnership between Trammell Crow Company and Georgia Tech that aims to attract health care innovation, life sciences, biotech and medical device innovation to the area.

Among the key themes Smith identified were specificity, creativity and partnership.

Specificity

“Going back to 2020, when we were negotiating this, the premier life sciences market [Boston] had 20 million square feet of life science space and less than 1% vacancy,” Smith said.

Today, that same market has 47 million square feet of space, rents that have declined roughly 30%, and a vacancy rate of 30%.

“The environment we were initially negotiating in and the environment that we’re in today are completely different,” Smith pointed out. When his team was negotiating the master development agreement, Smith said getting specific with benchmarking was something they did right.

“A lot of times if you have a document for a phase development, you might have market delay language that’s tied to some sort of overarching economic impact,” said Smith. A recession, for example. “What we benchmarked to was specific vacancy and availability of capital that was clearly identified in our master development agreement.”

Two years later, Smith and his team found themselves in a softer market. “We could point to the document and say, ‘Look, the vacancy in our three core markets has moved up by x percent; we’re going to claim a market delay here.’” That extra time was hugely beneficial.

“Codifying it so specifically in the document was a huge positive factor,” he added.