Getting Better Clients and Profits in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
The closer you get to your commercial real estate clients, the better it is for you in understanding their property or business frustrations and issues. You can then be the property solution provider that they need at the right time and in the right way.
(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)
So what can you do here? You should have a database of contacts and prospects that you are regularly working. Taking that to the next step, every VIP client should be profiled and prioritized for property interest, ownership, and timing. Take a serious look at your database and client list now. Look for the strengths and the weaknesses. Open up the relationships with the clients that really matter.
Get to know the issues
When you get deeper into the facts of the client and their property challenge or targets, there are things you can work on and with, such as:
- Lease improvement
- Finding more new tenants
- Fixing tenant mix problems and weaknesses
- Expanding an investment portfolio
- Resolving a vacancy matter or upcoming vacancy
- Changing property ownership
- Lifting property income for a pending sale, etc.
So the list goes on. You can be a real solution provider with many of these things for your location. Delve deeper and ask questions. You understand the local area better than some other people, so use that information to push lease and sales transactions together. Putting a sale or lease transaction together ‘off market’ is a great strategy. You don’t then have the interference of your competitors to worry about.
The time is now
Don’t wait for the market to come to you; go to the people before they realize that they have an issue, or the pressure gets too great. Show them what property investments and property ownership trends are doing. Where is the next opportunity for your clients? Find it and talk about it.
These are some of the main questions that you should explore with all of your good clients and prospects:
- What do they own now locally?
- Do they have any tenant or lease pressures that require resolve?
- Are any of their properties reaching the stage of redundancy or renovation?
- Do they have an income focus with the asset to satisfy a mortgage lender?
- If they run a business from the property, are all elements of property use satisfying their needs currently.
The message here is that you can do some valuable things when you get closer to your clients in commercial real estate. Concentrate your business efforts into the people that you already know and take that connection to the next level.