3 Highly Effective Systems to Follow in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Prospecting
The commercial real estate market has undergone significant changes in the past 5 to 10 years. However, there are still numerous opportunities for commercial real estate brokers and agents to discover, as long as they know how to identify the best clients and high-quality listings.
Choosing between ordinary properties and quality listings will always produce radically different results in interest and enquiry from the market.
Local area focus
I emphasize that the local area is important to the prospecting process given that in-depth prospecting within a confined location will help you uncover the new listing opportunities. Research is required, and a defined prospecting model that is methodically applied will always find new business.
If you spread yourself too widely across a larger zone of properties or a large city, it can become too difficult to isolate the next listing opportunities. It is a fact that commercial real estate prospecting requires a good degree of research and excellent communication skills.
Prospecting Methods and strategies
In an ongoing way the proactive commercial real estate broker can find plenty of new listings and quality sales and lease opportunities. The process of commercial real estate prospecting is methodical and direct. It is not something that can be delegated or overlooked. It is a personal process to be mastered by every commercial real estate broker or agent aspiring to reach the top of their industry.
Here then are some proven and successful ideas to help you find the next property listings in the local area within sales and leasing activity. Adjust the strategies to suit your local property market and location:
- BUSINESS TELEPHONE BOOK: From the local business telephone book, identify businesses within groups and segments. Focus on the groups and segments that are reasonably successful from a business perspective. Understand the business segments that are active locally given the local resources and major industries for your town or city. For example, you could choose some industries and services associated with the mining industry assuming that the mining industry is a successful part of commerce and industry for your town or city. Identify all of the local businesses that integrate into and serve the mining industry providing services and solutions. Directly prospect and cold call all of those local mining related businesses to identify any property challenges or opportunities they need to activate and deal with. It can take many months if not years for some businesses to adjust to another property change or challenge. The lead time to move property or expand business operations can be significant, so you must reach out to the business leaders in each case and stay with them from a marketing and communication perspective. It is so important to understand the particular property needs of each business and each client that you serve. Ongoing contact will help them remember you at the right time.
- MAJOR BUILDINGS: Select 25 major buildings in your town or city and over time identify the property owners in each case. Understand who those owners are for each property, where they are located, and how they like to invest their funds. Some of those buildings you research will be requiring specialized services including tenancy mix repositioning, leasing strategies, vacancy resolve, expenditure management, and project leasing. When you focus just on particular buildings, you can see the strategies and the challenges faced by owners. You can then be the solution to their property challenge. You could call this a degree of targeted marketing.
- SALES AND LEASING RECORDS: Review the property sales and leasing records for the region over the last 10 years. From those records you will find many active property investors looking to move again on the next property opportunity or building activity. It is important to understand the priorities of property investors as they seek to improve their investment position, so ask plenty of questions when it comes to the expectations of your clients and the successful property investors that you serve. Some of those investors will prefer particular property types, lease structures, and locations. When you know the priorities, you can match your prospecting model accordingly and find the listings more directly and effectively.
The commercial real estate prospecting process doesn’t need to be complex but it does need to be direct and consistent.
Each day, top real estate agents reach out to find new people and new properties to list. I go back to the point that communication skills are very important as part of a personal prospecting model. You can never know enough about real estate prospecting; over time, you can develop the system that works for you in your location, given your personal strengths and weaknesses.
These then have been some essential ideas to help you find new business activity and fresh new commercial property listings in the local area.
