One Broker’s Secret Marketing Strategy: Ten-X Commercial

Jay Lucas, a senior director at Cushman & Wakefield in Dallas, was tasked with selling a 60,000-square-foot office building that his client had on the market for more than five years.

“The property became tired,” he says. “The ownership either didn’t have the capital or didn’t want to do renovations and update the property. So, trying to position the property to achieve its potential value, was difficult to do.”

To meet the challenge, Lucas turned to Ten-X Commercial, the nation’s leading online real estate marketplace, which has facilitated the sale of over $50 billion in real estate.

Ten-X, which has transacted over 300,000 properties in the U.S., allows brokers to supercharge the sales process with deals that close twice as quickly as the average commercial real estate transaction.

By leveraging Ten-X Commercial, Lucas was able to sell the property for his client in less than four months, for over $4 million. “It was like I’d called Santa Claus,” he says. “It was perfect.”

With its vast reach in the real estate market, Ten-X exposed the property to a global set of buyers. Lucas’ client suddenly had interest from a variety of markets and, in a sign of Ten-X’s value to sellers, sold the building to an unknown buyer in its own market.

“We had never met. We knew nothing about them,” he says. “The property had a financing contingency, or it probably would have sold in 90 days. It worked out great.”

After closing this transaction, Lucas was a believer in the Ten-X platform. He used the marketplace to sell three buildings in Dallas, totaling approximately 250,000 square-feet. He began working on the deal this past March and, using Ten-X Commercial’s Offer Select transaction solution, closed the deal six month later for more than $12 million.

This time, Ten-X was part of his marketing strategy from the get-go.

“I told my client, this is the way to go—here’s what we’ll do, and here’s why it works,” he says. “They were thrilled with it. We had a lot of buyers come through, and my seller was thrilled with the whole process.”

Currently, Lucas has another deal in the works on Ten-X Commercial, and another he’s just getting off the ground.

After selling real estate for 38 years, Lucas knows the potential buyers in his market well. But Ten-X is now a key aspect of his sales process for its ability to help him identify buyers even he hadn’t come across before.

“With all my experience, there’s lots of people I know. But we don’t know everybody,” he says. “Ten-X’s online marketplace brings in so many potential buyers from around the world. Once a buyer shows an interest in a specific property or property type, Ten-X curates and matches similar properties a buyer might be interested in. That’s a major advantage to us. Plus, when somebody goes into the Ten-X platform and registers interest in a property, I know who they are, and I know how to contact them immediately.”

The most exciting part of using Ten-X Commercial for Lucas, though, comes in real time, during the bidding process with the Live Bid transaction solution.

“When you’re on the phone with the Ten-X team and potential buyers are bidding live—and the seller can see it—it’s an exciting and intense moment,” he says.

“When you hit the reserve and you start getting incremental bids above that, your seller is just grinning so big. They’re just like, ‘This worked.’ ”