Big Mistakes to Avoid in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
In most towns or cities the commercial real estate market can be a challenge for property agents and brokers. Finding clients, property investors, tenants and buyers requires real focus and a daily system of approach. It’s a personal thing that cannot be delegated.
As you move deeper into and around your property market you will find the things that are common problems for most agents. When you understand those problems you can resolve or remove them.
Common Real Estate Agent Problems
Here is a list of some of the most common challenges for real estate agents to consider:
- Finding high quality property listings to work on
- Getting a valid listing signed
- Negotiating marketing funds
- Having your client provide open and honest information to help the marketing and negotiation process
- Growing your database with quality clients and prospects
- Keeping other agents and brokers away from your listings and clients
- Negotiating fair commissions for the listing and the marketing work involved
- Having your clients ‘stick with you’ during difficult property marketing campaigns
- Arranging vendor paid marketing with your client and getting the money paid in advance
- Achieving a fair price or rent for the property in today’s market
- Negotiating complex property sales or leases with unrealistic parties
- Having your commissions paid in accordance with your terms of appointment
- Getting all of the property detail from the client as part of the listing process
Just about every single item in the list will be helped through and with the ‘exclusive’ listing process. There will always be the ‘open’ listing alternative as a last resort (if you want to take it); far too many agents accept that ‘open’ listing process as the ‘standard’. They think that by having many ‘open’ listings they will create lots of enquiries and inspections; the reality of things is quite the reverse. With ‘open’ listings there is virtually nothing you can control; any deal that you do is a process of luck.
A Listing Story
Recently I was talking with an agent friend in CBD sales and leasing. I put a leading question to her by asking, ‘How many listings have you got at the moment?’ The answer was ‘About 50’. I then asked, ‘How many of those are ‘exclusives’? The answer was ‘None’.
I knew for a fact that this agent was earning low commissions and struggling to get market share. The listings that she was converting to successful sales or leases were few, infrequent, and small; life was an ‘uphill’ battle. She had no quality stock, and all the listings she had were being promoted by many other local agents online and offline, and most of those listings were very ‘stale’.
We all have choices here in our profession. You can list everything ‘openly’ and thereby take on all listings be they good and bad, overpriced, stale, and redundant (some will convert eventually); however the result is usually stress, low levels of inbound enquiry, and low commissions.
High Quality Listings
A high quality property will never be ‘openly’ listed; the property owner of a high quality property is typically not that ‘dumb’. A good property promotion requires the focus of a skilled agent working on an exclusive marketing campaign for a reasonable length of time. To help remove all of the above problems from your property market, lift your relevance and skills as an agent so the ‘exclusivity’ decision is easy to pitch and convert with your clients.