Commercial Real Estate Brokerage – Call the Shots with Your Property Listing Signage
Putting plenty of property ‘sale’ and ‘lease’ signboards into your local area will help your commercial real estate business. That is both for you as an individual agent and also for your brokerage.
Most of the property enquiry coming in to a brokerage today will always be locally orientated or generated. The signboards can help you pull in the local interest and thereby create more enquiries and potentially inspections. When you focus locally you find more business; that is how things work in our industry.
Set your signboard rules and targets
There are a few things to understand here with signboards in commercial real estate brokerage:
- The boards that you place on ‘open’ listings are of little benefit considering that every other agent in the location will also have a board on the property. That then ‘cheapens’ the listing and the value of any enquiry.
- If your business model is to convert exclusive listings then the signboards are of great value in lifting enquiry. Make ‘exclusivity’ part of your listing pitch.
- Use special boards dedicated to the listing wherever possible. They can be larger and dedicated to the details of the listing and its features. High quality boards with a real message pull in the people.
- Simplicity of content and board design is much more effective in enquiry conversion than a board that is loaded with content and cluttered. Understand the target market that you are attracting and then pull in the enquiry with features and creative advertising copy.
- Make it easy for people to contact you from the signboard. Use mobile telephone and email contact detail to pull in the enquiry 7 days per week. As a general rule, always respond to a property enquiry within 12 hours. Most people will be looking at a few properties and on that basis will be ‘shopping around’.
- When you are ready to get a board into a location on a quality property, get some property brochures or flyers ready for personal distribution. The day that the board goes up is the day to talk to lots of local people and business owners in the street or surrounding area. Give out your brochures as part of that process. When you put yourself into the property marketing process you will find out lots of information regards the location and other property opportunities and or changes coming up.
- Do a board count for your area at least once per month so you can understand what is happening with listings and time on market. It also helps you know how your listing count compares in the location to others.
- Investigations into price and property quality should always happen with any other property listing in the area that you believe has relevance to your market and or property speciality. Know what the competing listings are doing and watch any conversions. Can you relate to the best approaches to marketing locally?
Use your signboards on listed properties as a base of leverage in attracting local property market enquiry. Build your personal property branding and marketing campaigns around good quality listings.
You can get more marketing tips for commercial real estate brokers in our ‘Snapshot’ eCourse right here.