Commercial Real Estate Brokers – Why You Should Invest Your Time with Accuracy and Precision
In commercial real estate brokerage your time is the most valuable resource that you have. How you use your time will impact client connections and new business opportunities. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to get diverted and distracted from the things that matter each day in commercial real estate brokerage.
If you are struggling with listings and commission opportunities now, take the time to review your typical working day and your activities over the last week. Consider the following questions:
- Have you been connecting with new people?
- Have you been building relationships with the right people?
- Have you been devoting at least 30% of your day to new business prospecting?
These can be difficult questions to answer given the number of distractions and diversions that happen every day when you work in sales, leasing, or property management. There are many things to do as you create your pipeline of opportunity and new business momentum.
Common Problems
These are the typical problems that regularly arise for most brokers and agents:
- New listings tend to take time with both marketing and inspections. When you have plenty of listings, the pipeline of new business prospecting tends to fall away off the priority list.
- Some clients can be very demanding; the same can be said for complex and large listings. For that reason, focus your efforts into listing exclusivity and work with high quality clients. In that way you will not be wasting your time with ‘rubbish’ properties that are too difficult to move or clients that are overly unrealistic in property expectations.
- When the property negotiations start, the prospecting pipeline typically gets neglected. If you have one or two deals moving towards or through negotiation, they should always take some reasonable level of priority in your diary of activities. That being said, the prospecting still needs to be done each day.
Set the Rules
Here are some fundamental rules that should apply to the activities of any commercial real estate broker or agent. However these rules compare to your activities over the last week?
- Finding new people – Your property market will always be changing and evolving given local economic trends and business activities. Some clients and prospects will also change focus and requirements when it comes to property activity, leasing, sales, and property management. Reach out to new people as well as existing contacts in a regular and ongoing way. Add 5 new people a day to your contact list and database.
- Connecting with existing contacts – Relevancy is quite important when you talk regularly to targeted people and prospects. You don’t want your approach to be regarded as an annoyance. What can you provide of an information nature that will be of use and of interest in any conversation?
- Reviewing and updating your database – Your database is the foundation of both listings and commissions. How many people do you know now? Perhaps and more importantly, how many people know you now as an industry professional that they can trust? Can you double that number over the next twelve months?
- Working around and with your listings – Every listing is a reason to talk to lots of local people. Take every good listing (preferably only those of ‘exclusivity’) and use them to grow your conversations with both business owners and local property investors.
- Seek referral business – Use the current list of people that you know, to build a list of referral leads and new relationships. Local business owners and property investors will know lots of other people.
So there are some things here that are really important if you want to grow your commercial real estate business. Are you using your time with accuracy and precision? You can see now why that is so important.
