During my c. 6 years at The Legal 500, I covered real estate in several key jurisdictions, including the US and UK, and led training sessions on coverage of the practice area. Here are pointers that can help improve your firm’s property submissions:

• Prioritise development work. This is naturally considered more complex than a one-off sale or lease renewal. Use your write-up to show a full-lifecycle service: mention previous work at the site, then focus on the complexities of your activities over the past year. Always make scale clear by stating GDV, total sq. ft, or number of units. Too many firms will, for example, exhibit financing at a major development site with no indication of whether this was an isolated instruction or part of a full lifecycle service.

• Only include construction work if appropriate. You can include front- and back-end construction only if the directory in your jurisdiction does not have a separate table for it. Note that most larger jurisdictions do have separate construction rankings.

• After project work, show portfolio management. Include leasing renewals and/or transactions. Focus on instructions for your largest property owners with the highest cumulative value of transactions over the past year.

• Then add your highest-value single-site transactions. Don’t rely solely on a big client name or headline value and be sure to detail the complexities of the transaction agreement.

• Leasing work comes next. Focus on your highest-value leases or those at the most prominent sites in your jurisdiction. Emphasise complexities of agreed terms; for example, pre-lets are generally more significant than straightforward renewals.

• Finance and property disputes: include sparingly. You may include a few, but double-check your jurisdiction doesn’t have dedicated rankings. If it does, don’t include them in your core real estate submission.

• Real estate components of major M&A deals. You can include some, but they shouldn’t dominate. If you do, make sure the summary focuses on the property aspects, not a copy of the high-level M&A overview.

• Show a broad range of assets. Firms can be marked down if most work is, e.g., purely residential or social housing. Also double-check the assets count as real estate and won’t be classified as infrastructure or energy.A healthy mix of mainstream and alternative assets is ideal.

• Include a varied roster of clients. Top-ranked firms typically act for investors, corporate occupiers and developers, not just one group or private clients. Also, include no more than two or three matters for a single client to demonstrate variety of instructions.

• Convey client quality with facts. Many researchers won’t know the largest developers or investors in a given jurisdiction. Add brief indicators, such as total assets, development pipeline value, etc, to signal the significance of your client roster.