Commercial Property Market Opportunities for Brokers Today
In commercial real estate brokerage, there are some reliable and stable opportunities that you can tap into most of the time in sales and or leasing of properties.
The seasonal sales and leasing opportunities are always active; the actions and market factors just shift from landlord to tenant, and seller to the buyer. So, the choice for you now is ‘Who do you work for?’ The answer probably has something to do with your skills and market knowledge. But also, choose the ideal client type that will offer you the most opportunity over time. Start calling people and tracking your progress.
Ways of Finding Listing Opportunities
Where are the property opportunities today then, and particularly in your location? If you have a listing ‘slow down’, then try a few of these ideas to help you get listing stock growing again and market share shaping around you.
- Local area changes – If you work a defined area or territory, it is quite easy to see where things are changing with business activity and property occupancy. Get out into your ‘zone’ or ‘territory’ each day to see what may be happening to properties and or occupants. Another ‘sure-fire’ way to find out what is happening as part of that, is to talk to the local tenants or business owners. They will know their location more comprehensively than you do. They will share information with you if you ask the right questions.
- Major businesses – When you consider your town or city there will be some dominant businesses or industries perhaps driven by resources and or manufacturing activity in your location. They will also have ‘sub-sets’ of industries supporting them or integrating into their ‘channels of business’. Go deeper into the business segments and ask questions about how the sectors are going or what people and companies may be needing. Expansion or contraction may be a requirement for some of the local business segments.
- Newspapers – Scan the newspapers daily as there will be some information in each daily paper that will be valuable market intelligence to tap into later. What you are looking for are names, changes, and events. Tie the names to the industries. From that point you can start the investigations into the leaders of the businesses; make the connections.
- Press releases online – Set up one of the search engines (Google is a good one for this), to send you news reports and anything that is linked to ‘keywords’ for your location or property type. You can have a special separate email for this resource material. Investigate the information weekly so you can call people as required. Connect the dots. That’s how market intelligence works in commercial real estate sales and leasing.
- Road and freeway concentration – Get a road map of your town or city and highlight the prime precincts or property zones on the main roads. Work with approximately 10 to 20 precincts, and then ‘drill down’ into property ownership records, tenant occupancy, and vacancies. Also look for the older properties as they are likely to be ‘prime’ for change or renovation. While you are doing the review, identify the vacancy trends by suburb and by prime precinct. Soon you will see where businesses are moving to or away from.
The commercial property market is not a complex industry segment. The ‘channels’ of opportunity are usually tenants, business owners, property owners, and developers.
When you work the ‘channels’, you simply make the calls and the connections. Eventually, you will find the new business and the listing stock. Focus on getting listing stock. The property market comes to you when you have the listing stock. That is what you want.