Commercial Real Estate Prospecting 101 – Some Easy Solutions

Commercial real estate prospecting today, what is it, why do it, and how can you get it right for commercial investment property sales or leasing? Simple questions like these are so important and will impact your career as an agent in so many ways. Let’s look at that.

If you are going to look for new real estate business in your location so you can create more sales listings, then there are some decisions to make and action systems to put in place. The most successful top agents in the real estate game focus on their marketplace strategies, action plans, and services.

Generic and average real estate agents, on the other hand, typically ‘struggle’ with processes and consistency. As a result, they fall back into the ‘average’ performance category and do not attract quality listings in an ongoing way.

The Best Action to Take

So, what is the critical fact to understand? A commercial real estate career is not just about knowledge but, more importantly, the consistent action that each agent creates.

Commercial real estate is a very personal business type. Whilst you may work for a brokerage, that brokerage’s brand is only of some 10% value to you. The only thing the ‘brand’ does for you is to help in ‘opening the door’ with people locally.

Have you been having enough real estate conversations with new people this week to find the leads and listings you need? It’s important to reflect on whether you’ve met your contact goals and whether there were opportunities to speak with more people.

Daily Real Estate Conversations

So, the question is how to create more daily conversations. That can be across the telephone and in person. Conversations made are the ‘A’ class activities we should work towards daily as agents. How many conversations can you start, and how will that be done?

The best way to proceed with this business approach is to mix your prospecting approaches up into a few simple groups of activities that you can do every day:

• Telephone calls to new people
• Door-knocking local businesses
• Meetings with identified property owners or landlords

Look back at these strategies and think about how that can happen for you. Research is required, of course, and you will need some organisation for that; the arrangement can be a spreadsheet or database. So that is the base real estate prospecting plan. Talk to people; create conversations daily.

Start your list and grow it each day. Take ownership of your database list, your contact processes and your conversations. The property owners and landlords locally like to talk to agents occasionally to get the facts about what is happening in the property market and why.

Think Local Real Estate and Be Local

Provide information to the local people and build your brand around that. You know the local property market, so stay abreast of the supply and demand factors and the prices and rents. In that way, you can talk from a position of knowledge about what is happening and why.

Considering the previously mentioned strategies for prospecting, consider splitting up your allocated territory into ‘blocks’ of a few hundred properties. That way, you can research people and properties by groups and find things that can lead to listings. You can also split up your allocation of blocks into property groups.

Today we have plenty of property research tools on our computers and in the ‘cloud’. Keep things simple but choose a few tools to advance your real estate business. Simplicity wins more new business than any other process in commercial real estate today.