An Easy Do It Yourself Marketing Plan in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate, and as a broker or agent, you need a marketing plan for yourself if you want to succeed with listings and commissions.

How you do that will depend on several things including property speciality, customer types, and future opportunity.  Talk to people and put yourself into the local area when it comes to businesses, properties, and investors.

Why do this? The marketing plan you create takes over your brokerage momentum, and over time, that marketing plan can be shaped and honed.  Personal opportunity then evolves.  Consistency and targeted actions will help you get better results in brokerage.  So, what is your marketing plan?

What is Your Opportunity?

Before saying too much here, what is an ‘opportunity’ for you as a broker today?  What does it look like and where does it come from?  What types of new business do you believe is a real ‘opportunity’ for you over time?  Determine your answers in the categories of:

• Sales of investment property or owner-occupied buildings – Know the property types and buildings as part of this question.  Perhaps you should also consider development land as part of that question.
• Leasing of offices, retail, and industrial properties – The property types will determine rents and stock availability. Choose the ‘channels’ of property that will drive leasing enquiry and ‘churn’ from the local area of businesses and precincts.
• Property Management appointments – This can be a side issue and a long-term client service. Perhaps you don’t want to do the property management work yourself, but you will have people in your team who can help with that.  Property management services help you retain your clients for the longer term.
• The Property Types are important – Choose your property types to your specialisation and your acquired property knowledge. You cannot specialise in everything and everywhere.  Drill down into certain property types in certain locations and then make plenty of contact to property owners and occupants in that targeted group.
• The Client Types – Some clients are better than others, and when you choose your client focus, you will know how to pitch your services with relevance. That then makes your prospecting processes more successful.
• Timing and the Property Seasons – Look at your location and determine when you think property sales and leasing activity is at its ‘highest’ seasonally. You can then ‘ramp up’ your new business focus with a bias towards timing.

Build Your Marketing Plan Easily this Way

When you know these things, then you can start to build your marketing plan.  Here is an ‘easy to do’ marketing plan for yourself:

1. Concentrate on zones and buildings – split your area up into zones and buildings where you can focus on the best precincts and properties. That ‘bias’ will help you with the ‘quality’ end of what you are trying to achieve.  Stay away from the low-class assets and those that would not attract good enquiry.
2. Make plenty of calls every day – those calls should be to people that you have researched and pre-qualified as potential new business opportunities. Make your outbound calls over 2 or 3 hours each day.
3. Drop in your business cards to local businesses – this is a good strategy and very useful for local area ‘penetration’. It is a cheap and direct way of marketing your professional skills.  Visit about 20 businesses a day in your location and leave your business card.  It is as easy as that.
4. Set some VIP targets – those VIPs will be people as local property investors and or business owners. Create about 50 people to put in that list and start talking to them.  Know why they are VIP’s for you. Perhaps you can get repeating business from them over time.  Perhaps it is the size or type of business that you want. Either way, make sure you have a VIP list and nurture it over time.

From all these things, you build meeting momentum with key people and those that need property help.  That is the secret to creating a big and robust commercial real estate business.  This concept can then be your ‘do it yourself marketing plan’.  Get started, and soon you will see the results in clients, listings, and commissions.