You closed the deal months ago. The lease is signed, the tenant has the keys, and your commission agreement is sitting in a folder with a number on it that you have already mentally spent. The problem is the number is split, half on execution and half on occupancy, and the second half is parked behind a build-out that keeps slipping. Your pipeline is healthy. Your bank balance is not. That gap, between work you have already done and money that has not landed yet, is the entire reason commission advances exist.
This guide covers what a commercial leasing commission advance is, how it works, what it costs, who qualifies, and how to decide whether it is the right move for a given deal. It is written for the broker doing the work, not for a finance committee. Where a topic deserves its own deep dive, we point you to it.
A commission advance is the sale of a commission you have already earned but have not yet been paid. You assign the right to that future payment to a funding company. They pay you most of it now, they collect the full amount later when the deal pays out, and they keep a fee for bridging the time in between.
The word that matters there is sale. You are not borrowing against the commission. You are selling a receivable you already own. That distinction sounds like a technicality until you look at what it changes in practice. There is no monthly repayment schedule. There is no interest accruing on a balance. In most structures there is no personal guarantee and no hit to your credit, because nothing is being lent to you. We cover the accounting and tax angle of that in the dedicated guide on whether an advance counts as debt.
The mechanic is old. Factoring receivables has funded businesses for centuries. What is specific here is the asset, a commercial leasing commission, which is unusually well suited to it. The commission is documented, the payor is identifiable, and the amount is fixed. That is a clean receivable to underwrite, which is why a specialist can fund it quickly.
Sales commissions tend to pay at closing. Leasing commissions do not, and that is the root of the cash flow problem. A commercial lease commission is usually paid in two pieces. The first piece is triggered when the lease is fully executed. The second piece is triggered by something later, most often the tenant taking occupancy or opening for business.
Between execution and occupancy, a lot happens. Space gets demised. Tenant improvement work gets bid, permitted, and built. Long-lead items show up late. A ninety day build-out turns into five months. Your second commission payment, which is real money you have earned, sits behind all of that with no way for you to speed it up. On a renewal or an expansion the trigger language can be even murkier, and on a bad deal the landlord simply drags.
We break the timing down milestone by milestone in the guide on when commercial leasing brokers actually get paid, and we cover the specific occupancy trap in the piece on execution versus occupancy splits. The short version for now is that the delay is structural. It is built into how leasing pays. An advance is one of the few levers a broker actually controls.
The common thread is timing, not trouble. Plenty of brokers who use advances are doing fine. They simply do not want a healthy commission frozen for six months while rent, payroll, marketing, and their own draw keep moving.
There are tenant-rep-specific and landlord-rep-specific versions of this guide if your deals lean one way, and an asset class breakdown for office, industrial, retail, and medical, since each one has its own timing quirks.
The process is shorter than most brokers expect. At a high level it runs in five steps.
The full walkthrough, including the exact documents and what verification actually checks, is in the step-by-step guide on how a commission advance works. The funding speed question, hour by hour, is its own piece on how long a commission advance takes.
An advance is not free, and any company that pretends otherwise is hiding the cost somewhere. The honest way to think about it is simple. You are paying for time and for certainty. You get your money months early, and you transfer the wait, and some of the risk of a slow payout, to someone else.
A clean fee structure is a flat rate for the time the advance is outstanding, with no stacked origination charge, no underwriting add-on, and no compounding. You should be able to see the total dollar cost before you sign and have it not move. The full breakdown, including a worked example and a cost table by how long the deal takes to pay, is in the guide on commission advance fees. The pricing traps to watch for across the industry are covered in the piece on red flags in commission advance pricing.
You do not advance the entire commission. A portion is held back and reconciled when the deal pays out, which protects both sides if the final number shifts. The advance is a percentage of the earned commission, and the exact figure depends on deal size, how far out the payout is, and how clean the agreement is.
There are practical minimums and maximums, and the math is easier to follow with real numbers, so the full treatment lives in the guide on how much you can advance on a single commission. If you want to see the net-to-broker math on a specific deal, the worked example in get paid early on a commercial lease runs the numbers end to end.
Qualification is about the deal more than about you. The cleaner and more verifiable the commission, the easier it is to fund. In broad terms you need to be properly licensed and named on the commission agreement, the deal needs to be executed rather than pending, and the commission needs to be a fixed amount owed by an identifiable payor.
What slows things down or stops them is the opposite of all that, an unsigned deal, a contingent or disputed commission, or a payor no one can pin down. The complete checklist, the eligible deal types, and the common reasons applications get declined are in the guide on who qualifies for a commission advance.
An advance is a tool, not a default. It earns its fee when the money does more for you now than the fee costs you, or when the certainty is worth paying for. It is the wrong call when the cost outweighs a short, predictable wait.
It tends to make sense when the second half of a commission is months out and you have a real use for the cash, when a tax bill or a fixed obligation is due before the deal pays, when a time-sensitive opportunity needs capital you have technically already earned, or when a slow or shaky payor makes the certainty worth buying. It tends not to make sense when the payout is days or a couple of weeks away, when you have reserves that cover the gap comfortably, or when the deal itself is still uncertain.
The fuller comparison against other ways to raise cash, lines of credit, HELOCs, SBA loans, cards, is in the guide on commission advance versus other financing options. The conceptual question of why selling an asset beats taking on debt is its own piece.
Numbers make it concrete. Say you earned an $80,000 commission on a lease. Half paid at execution. The other $40,000 is tied to occupancy, and the build-out has pushed that roughly six months out.
You could wait six months for the $40,000. Or you could advance most of it now, pay a fee for the months it is outstanding, and put the cash to work today. Whether that trade is worth it depends on the fee and on what the money does for you in the meantime. We run the full arithmetic, including the exact net to the broker, in the worked example guide, and you can model your own deal in the calculator embedded on this page.
If you have an executed deal with a commission that has not paid yet, the fastest path is to request a quote with the commission agreement in hand. You will get the advance amount and the exact fee back, with no obligation to take it. From there, funding a clean file is usually a matter of a day or two.
Cash For Commish works only with commercial real estate brokers, which is the whole point. The deals are underwritten by people who already understand a leasing commission agreement, an occupancy trigger, and a TI delay, so verification is faster and the terms fit the way leasing actually pays. If you have a commission stuck behind an occupancy date, that is exactly the situation this is built for.
No. It is the sale of a commission you have already earned. You assign the future payment to the funder, who pays you most of it now and collects it later. Because nothing is being lent, there are no monthly payments and typically no credit impact. The accounting detail is covered in the dedicated guide on whether an advance is debt.
A clean file is often funded within a day or two of approval. Speed depends mostly on how quickly the commission can be verified with the paying party. The detailed timeline is in the guide on how long a commission advance takes.
Verification is a normal, low-key confirmation that the commission is owed. It is not a collections call. Most paying parties have seen advances before, and the assignment simply redirects where the eventual payment is sent.
That is exactly why a portion is held back rather than advanced. The deal is reconciled when it pays out, so a change in the final number is accounted for rather than leaving you exposed.
No. An advance is deal by deal. Most brokers use it selectively, on the specific commissions that are stuck the longest or when they have a real use for the cash sooner.
This guide is general information for commercial real estate brokers and is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Terms vary by deal. Confirm specifics with Cash For Commish and, where relevant, your own accountant or attorney.
