If you're heading into leasing brokerage, there's a choice you need to make before you accept a role, and most people don't fully understand what they're choosing.
Both tenant reps and lanrdlord reps do leasing. But the business model, the daily rhythm, and the career that follows are substantially different.
We've seen a number of people try to make this decision without truly understanding the differences. The goal of this post is to help illustrate some of the critical factors that should be considered when making this decision.
The basic setup
Every lease negotiation is a contest between two parties with genuinely opposing interests. Landlords want to maximize the value of their asset: highest possible rent, longest possible term, fewest possible concessions. Tenants want the opposite: flexibility, favorable economics, and space that actually fits how their business operates today and where it might go tomorrow.
The balance of power between them shifts with the market and submarket conditions around supply and demand. In a tight market with low vacancy, landlords hold the leverage. They can push rents, resist concessions, and let deals walk. In an oversupplied market, tenants can extract significant value: free rent, generous tenant improvement allowances, shorter lease terms, early termination rights. Neither side is naturally stronger. It depends on the market, the submarket, and sometimes the specific building.
Leasing brokers exist to help their clients navigate that dynamic. Tenant reps arm businesses with the market intelligence, negotiating leverage, and deal structure expertise to compete against a landlord who does this every day. Landlord reps do the reverse: positioning their properties to attract the right tenants, running competitive processes that protect their client's economics, and negotiating terms that ideally improve asset value. What each party is optimizing for couldn't be more different.
How the two businesses work
Tenant reps have to build their pipeline from scratch and keep building it. Especially early on, a large share of your time goes to business development activities like prospecting, networking, cultivating relationships with companies that might need space someday. There's no guaranteed flow of deals. You create it and it takes time.
The upside is that client relationships compound. Help a company with their first office lease and you might handle their expansion, their relocation, their new market entry. The CFO might refer you to three portfolio companies. One good relationship can generate revenue for a decade. The best tenant reps aren't just good at closing deals. They're good at becoming the advisor companies call before they even start looking.
Landlord reps hold exclusive listings on specific properties and focus on filling that space. Deal flow is steadier because tenant reps and other brokers are constantly bringing opportunities to the buildings you represent. The market comes to you more than you go to it.
The tradeoff: your income is tied to how much space you have to lease and how attractive that space is relative to others. A strong portfolio in active submarkets is valuable. A weak one limits you regardless of how talented you are.
Career Bridge's leasing track goes inside both sides with compensation benchmarks, critical success factors, and a framework for deciding which one fits before you commit
The compensation
Commission splits on most leasing transactions favor tenant reps: roughly two-thirds to the tenant rep side, one-third to the landlord rep, per deal.
But landlord reps with strong portfolios tend to close more transactions overall. So the per-deal split doesn't tell the whole story. Both sides build serious income. The path to it is just different.
There’s more nuance and differentiation in how the compensation progresses between the two, but grasping the general idea is important. Tenant reps tend to do less deals, but ger paid more per deal. Landlord reps tend to do more deals, but get paid less per deal.
So which one is actually you?
Two questions that sort it out faster than anything else.
Are you energized by hunting for new business? If building a client pipeline from scratch and continuously growing it feels exciting rather than draining, tenant rep is probably your side. The best tenant reps are relentless at prospecting and genuinely curious about how businesses work. That curiosity is what turns a transaction into a long-term relationship.
Do you want to become the deep expert on specific markets and buildings? If the idea of being the person every broker in the market calls first, because you know the properties, the submarkets, and the competitive landscape better than anyone, that's the landlord rep mindset. The best landlord reps build expertise that makes them indispensable to the owners they represent.
Neither side is easier. Neither side is more prestigious. They're fairly just different businesses that happen to share the title “leasing broker”.
Make the choice based on how you actually like to work. You'll be doing it for a while.
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