Commercial Real Estate Broker – Developing Market Reach
In commercial real estate brokerage, market reach is something that comes with specialisation of or within a property type. For example if you specialise in selling and leasing larger industrial warehouses, your reach and market penetration could be regional or national, depending on the size of warehouse that you work on.
The bigger businesses shift goods around the country and the warehouses that they use in the process are very big. The leasing deals with these large businesses can be huge, but in saying that you will need some strong relationships to open the doors on client opportunity.
You could say that the quality listings come to you much more easily when you are recognised as the ‘go to expert’. This ‘mantle’ or ‘industry profile’ doesn’t come easily but it does come if you deliberately grow your knowledge in the property type and let the extended ‘market reach’ take a part in promoting your profile as a quality agent or broker for the bigger industrial sites.
A Wise Comment
One wise and simple comment was made to me years ago by a clever and driven commercial real estate broker. It goes something like this:
‘When you have the quality listing stock, the property market follows you’
The broker making the comment was at the top of their industry segment. They had a large market reach and penetration because they focused their prospecting efforts on high-quality large properties. They also stayed within their property type or specialisation. Over time their coverage of the market moved from suburb to city, and later from city to state; they also did some very large deals interstate and nationally simply because of the people that they knew in the right companies. The broker in this situation was a ‘trusted advisor’ in so many respects. As we all know, that is how you attract the real business over time.
The Expert People Need
So let’s take some examples here from the ‘industrial warehouse’ specialist profile mentioned earlier. How could you build that profile to regional and national level? How can you extend your reach as the expert people need? Try some of these:
- Research all the logistics and warehousing businesses that move products and supplies around the country. Find out where they move goods to and from. Get to understand their clients by category and location. Their client list should be a target of your prospecting.
- Connect with all the businesses that claim to offer ‘supply chain solutions’ for major corporate groups and industries. Most ‘supply chain’ companies have the need for distribution points and particularly warehousing.
- Understand how the ports, airports, and railheads work in your town or city. Large warehousing requirements could exist as a result of those transport hubs.
- Shortlist the largest warehousing users locally and regionally into segments of food distribution, white-goods electrical, bulky goods storage and logistics, furniture manufacturing and distribution, clothing, and general manufacturing.
So these simple ideas can help you set the foundations of a dominant market share as a specialised commercial real estate broker. They can give you the direction and traction to create real market reach as a top agent.
