Answering All Your Questions about New Client Relationships in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
If you want a reasonably successful time in commercial real estate brokerage, then build your business around clients and client services.
Match your skills to the requirements of the clients today and the pressures of your property market.
Focus on controlling good quality listing stock; in that way people have to come to you with enquiries. That is the basic rule of commercial real estate brokerage.
Why do this?
To win new clients, you must be relevant and skilful as a broker or agent. The people in the property market want to work with the best agents that have all the right skills for their property challenge. Understanding that there are many agents in most towns or cities chasing the same clients and property listings, the ‘relevance’ factor is something that has to be built with deliberate effort.
So this is what clients generally want from a property transaction:
- The best price or rent
- A timely solution
- Good momentum to create inspections and negotiations
- Professional skills of the agent when it comes to new the marketing and documentation for any listing
- A controlled result for the client
When you really understand these things, you have something to work with when it comes to pitching and presenting for any listing. You can match your property services directly into the client and their property challenge.
What’s the difference?
So let’s build some client relevance with this concept in mind:
- Understanding investment variables – Your local property market will have changes underway with future and current supply and demand. Those pressures will impact returns, enquiry, and negotiations. Position your marketing, inspections, and negotiations with a view to the current trends in property investment.
- Reporting and communication – Build a matrix of communication tools that you can use with any client as you work through their sale or lease situation. You can use email, auto responders, telephone, cell phone, and SMS messages. There is no excuse for not contacting a client today with a relevant property issue. Some agents will even go so far as to offer all of their exclusive clients a special private portal on the brokerage website where listing information can be kept and inspection reports lodged. Do the things that make the clients that you work with feel special.
- Leasing alternatives – Whilst the client may have a vacancy to fill or a leasing challenge with the tenant mix to resolve, you can offer many strategies allowing for market rent, incentives, marketing, tenant attraction, lease inspections, and negotiations. Pull in the right tenant attraction factors to every leasing appointment of an exclusive nature.
- Marketing strategies – What can you do to lift the property profile in marketing? How can you make the property more attractive to local buyers, tenants, and or business people? Your marketing message should be crafted with a view to the strengths of the property and the selected target market. How can you do that? How can you put yourself into the marketing equation so that the buyers and tenants are attracted to the listing?
You can base all of your client interaction around specific skills like these. In that way you are more relevant as an agent or broker and your services are more attractive to the clients that you serve.
