How Direct Telephone Cold Calls Win New Business in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate brokerage, you have to know a lot of people and understand their property needs.  Your database of contacts and market intelligence will be the foundation of many property leads and opportunities.

So how many people should you know in commercial real estate within your location?  Several hundred is the best answer.  

Any good broker with a reasonable market share will know at least 500 VIP prospects and clients within their region.  Their database may, of course, be bigger than that, although the list of VIP clients will be a smaller segment within the main list so that they can focus their telephone calls and meeting strategies.

A Good Client List Number for Your Database

That is why 500 is a good number of people to have in your database.  As you qualify more people you can decide whether they should be moved into the VIP segment of your database.  You can then concentrate your efforts in your VIP group of key property people.

When you know a lot of people involved in your property market, the telephone is or should be your friend.  It saves you a lot of time, allows you to set up new meetings, and helps you direct inbound inquiries from qualified people.  Every broker and agent should have a direct telephone approach as part of their daily business activities.  Don’t let a day pass without making new telephone calls to new people.

Cold Calling Rules

Here are some important rules for the use of a telephone prospecting model in commercial real estate:

1. Regular calls: Set aside a couple of hours every day to make calls to new people.  That will be a difficult task at times given that you will be quite busy with clients and listings.  Make it a priority to connect with new people at least once per day. New people will help you grow your database and find new leads.
2. Restrict inbound call times: Don’t let the mobile telephone interrupt important things.  Turn your mobile telephone off when you have meetings and when you are making outbound prospecting calls.  You do not need distractions.
3. Watch your numbers: It takes time to get results from telephone prospecting, so track your numbers so you can see when things are improving.  The numbers to track are usually the calls outbound, calls coming in, inquiries on listings, and conversions to meetings.
4. Use a database with a diary and task system:  When you talk to a lot of people, you will need to capture the content of the conversation into a database for actioning at a later time.  The organisation will be achievable if you have a good database program.

All of this seems quite logical. That being said, most agents and brokers do not make enough outbound calls.  If you want to find new business quickly in your location, start making cold calls and develop a professional process to support you.  Understand just who your target clients are and start making the calls.