Commercial Real Estate Brokerage – A Detailed Model for Repeat Client Contact
When it comes to growing and strengthening your commercial real estate database, you should consider a contact model that helps the client and their property focus.
Property marketing should always be about the client and their property needs; not about you and your commission requirements. The mindset difference is extraordinarily important when it comes to building a real estate business and market share domination.
To win new commercial real estate business, a solid base of ‘relevance’ should be built with the prospects and clients that you serve. Over time you have to connect with the same people with information that will help them.
Clients: Be There When They Need Help
Being in the right place at the right time will help greatly with new listing conversions. You should therefore focus your client contact model on helping the client to remember you at the right time and for the right reasons. When they need property help, your name has to be at the top of their list. How can you do that? The simple answer involves ‘direct marketing’. Here are some ideas to help with that:
- Blogging, Articles, and Editorials – Every good agent or broker should have a blog platform where they can comment about the local property market in a direct and relevant way. They can incorporate photos, statistics, and editorial to make the content stand out in a helpful way. Blogging platforms are easy to establish and cost nothing to use other than the time and effort to build. Some very good books have been written about that process.
- Social media – Every article or blog post created online can be fed into your social media strategy. Local area comments and property type specific comments will generally be preferred by the search engines. Good property content designed as part of a particular informative process can be seen quickly by the search engines. Regularity and relevance are the keys to being seen by the search engines. You will need to post your information 3 or more times per week. That is not a daunting task if you really do know a lot about the local area and the property market.
- Case studies – When you achieve a good property result from any sale or lease, get a case study out online to spread the word. Information is interesting and useful to other property owners and business proprietors in the same location. Use your successful results to pull in the new business enquiry.
- Referrals – When you have achieved a good result for a client with a property listing, ask for leads and referrals to others that they know. Referral business is easy to convert when you know how to ask the questions at the right time.
- Telephone calls and Meetings – Get in contact with all the people in your database at least once every 60 to 90 days and do so in a relevant way. That takes personal time and direct effort. You cannot delegate that requirement to any other person. Every day your client and prospect contact time should happen first and foremost at the very start of the day, and that is certainly before anything else happens; the time commitment for that contact should be at least 3 hours.
- Direct mail and Emails – Everything that you send out by mail or email should be personalised and based on your awareness of the person you are connecting with. It is better to send out information in that way that can be followed up. Avoid sending out general coverage marketing material.
From these simple facts you can see how repeat client contact can be an important part of your services to investors and business owners. Establish the client contact model that really does provide direct and relevant local information.
