Commercial Real Estate Brokerage – How to Know Where Your Business is Headed
When you look into your real estate team and within the average brokerage, you will find that people respond differently to the opportunities and motivations of the industry. Some agents and brokers will be better than others. The earning differential between the team and across the property disciplines will be large.
Look at the elements of sales, leasing, and property management. Real specialists are required in each segment of the industry. You can then say that further specialisation is required with the office property, industrial property, and retail shopping centres.
The industry averages
At the bottom end of the scale, some agents in your team may only last six months within the industry. At the top end of the scale some of the best brokers and agents will be in the industry for over 20 years. The fact of the matter is that the industry is highly rewarding for those that can send the right marketing message and generate the right client relationships.
Professionalism is important across all parts of the industry. Sales leasing and property management all offer massive opportunity for the right individuals showing the best levels of professional skill.
Some valuable skills
If you are a sales manager or a team leader in a commercial real estate brokerage, here are some rules and skills to develop and help you understand the opportunities that you can work through:
- MOTIVATE: Every team member will be different personally in both motivations and property related skills. There may be some real challenges to address with some individuals when it comes to property knowledge and negotiation. It is one thing to know a lot about property locally, it is another to put that knowledge into practice. Encourage every member of your real estate team to improve their knowledge in parallel to their business skills. A top agent is usually an excellent communicator and professional negotiator; the two matters go hand in hand.
- JOB SPECIFICATIONS: New business generation should be part of the job specification for every person within your brokerage team. It is very easy for some agents and brokers to develop a level of complacency and poor performance when the property market is buoyant and active. When a few good listings and deals occur, individuals can become less focused on the future need for new business opportunity. If any person within your team is not prospecting on a regular daily basis, that can be the start of a significant business problem. There is a lead time between prospecting processes, finding new client connections, and creating the new business opportunities.
- ACTION IS EVERYTHING: Help the team move ahead through setting our real definite plan of action and a realistic set of goals. It is perhaps strange to say, but some agents and brokers do not have a personal plan of approach to establish their new business generation and client opportunity. They let the days and the weeks pass without a deliberate and dedicated focus. That can be the beginning of a very real problem within the team. It takes six months to get traction in the marketplace, it also takes six months to lose market share. Personal effort is required across the team in all the property specialities and disciplines. Help the team see the big picture and direct the team focus into the market segments that are profitable. Prior to the beginning of every financial year, establish a business plan incorporating the efforts of every individual at a realistic level. If any member of the team requires skill development or knowledge enhancement, build the program into your business model.
Taking these factors into account, you can realign the professional skills and relationships between the brokerage team and across the business. Things can then move ahead to a new level of opportunity across listings, clients, and commissions. The term is called ‘alignment’ and it is the process of tuning team performance into the targets of the business. Build those commercial real estate alignment processes between sales, leasing, and property management.
You can get more brokerage tips about commercial real estate in our Snapshot eCourse right here.
