Get Leverage with Better Market Share and Listings in Commercial Real Estate
They say that listings are everything in commercial real estate brokerage and they would be right. The fact of the matter is that listings let you attract enquiry and control the sales or leasing deal. It is much harder when you work with buyers and tenants and you have no listings.
When you start up in a new area or start your career in commercial real estate it can be really hard because:
- You don’t have listings
- You don’t know the right people to talk to
- The property enquiry is not coming to you
- Other agents are ‘jumping’ all over your patch and prospects
- Clients and prospects don’t know you as an agent or broker
- You have no point of difference that is of interest to the ‘players’ of the market
So where can you go with all of this? Understand this fact, the clock is always ticking. Don’t put off difficult things till another day, as that is the start of a bad habit in commercial real estate. Be prepared to do the ‘hard stuff’ from the very start each and every day. Soon the ‘hard stuff’ gets a lot easier and that is what you need.
Your focus should always be to ‘Drive better market share and fresh listings that you can control.’ It’s a very simple rule that requires a bit of personal focus and a lot of action. Habits should be set that allow you to do that.
I have said it many times that exclusive listings are really important in our industry. Get control of the listing stock. Drive your market share in a property type so you can be regarded as an industry specialist. It directly follows that clients like to work with ‘industry specialists’.
The best way to grow your market share as an agent is to consider key strategies similar to the following:
- Get signboards into your sales and leasing territory and particularly on quality listings. In the first instance you may need to do that on ‘open’ listings, but soon move across to ‘exclusives’. The way that you do that is through shaping a relevant and focused presentation and pitching process. Practice your presentation accordingly.
- Have something to say of editorial value and get it into the local paper property pages. Newspapers like to have things that lift readership value. Be controversial and direct; say things that make people think. Use the newspapers as a marketing tool.
- Start a blog on property activity in your area. That will be a special process requiring time and content. It is not really hard to do but you will require a good content article each day to load to your blog. You want the search engines and particularly Google to see you as a source of local property market information. If you do a fresh article each day, it will only be a small amount of time before the search engines see that and keep coming back to you. If the content is relevant to the searching public, your blog site will rank higher and push your name as a property expert.
- Personally approach new people to talk to every day. This can be a very big challenge because you have to find the time and develop the skills to do the prospecting. You must have your diary under control as part of that process. Most agents and brokers really don’t like talking to new people because it stretches the skill requirements; many brokers have a solid dose of call reluctance and would rather be doing something else (strange isn’t it?). If you want to get anywhere in our industry, this fact must be sorted and resolved. Talk to new people. That is the rule as part of growing your business. Put fresh people into your pipeline.
Life doesn’t need to be hard as a commercial real estate agent or broker. It just needs to be very disciplined and driven. Are you up to the challenge?
