How to Analyse Your Competitors in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate brokerage, it pays to monitor your competitors in a number of ways so you can see how you can grow market share in listings and commissions.  Understand the strengths and weaknesses that apply to all of your real estate competitors.

Penetrate your competitors market by tapping into their weaknesses.  If any of the identified strengths are seen to be real and relevant to the market and the location, how can you replicate or improve on those facts?  Awareness will help you see opportunities.

A top real estate agent is always on the lookout for ways to improve and grow new business and listings.  The marketing process never stops for the top agents of the market; look, listen, and learn from the best people in your industry.

So what can you assess and monitor for opportunity in commercial real estate?  Try these for starters:

1. Review signboards for all your competitors.  Assess the numbers of signs on exclusive listings.  Add to that the numbers of open listings.  Look at the ratios between each.  Those brokerages with more exclusive listings are the ones to watch closely.  You must know how and why they are getting a better than average conversion on exclusive listings.  There will be reasons.
2. Some brokerages will be focusing in a particular territory, or part of a town or city.  Understand the zones of activity and the different brokers and agents in each.  Some of those brokers or agents will be better than others.  Understand why those ‘top agents’ are holding a larger slice of the market.  There will be ways to replicate their actions and strategies.
3. Count the numbers of listings on the internet for each brokerage and agent.  Soon you will see some higher than average performances in listing and internet advertising.  When you track the listings look at the numbers between open listing, exclusive listing, and time on market.  Some of your competitors will be better than others.
4. Review the ‘social media’ profiles and systems for each brokerage and top agent.  Only a small number of agents will be doing it well.  There are ways of building online presence including blogging, articles, newsletters, press releases, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  You don’t have to do too many of these, but you do have to do some; consistency is the key to creating a good online presence as an agent or broker.
5. Check out the websites for all of your competitors.  Assess the complexity of the sites, the specialisation, the keywords, and the property listings.  Some brokerages will use multiple sites as part of an internet matrix of coverage.   Some sites will be designed with a property location or property type in mind; this then makes it easier to capture buyers and tenants that are searching on certain keywords.  Review the websites further.  Are they using professional photos with listings?  Are the listings well-crafted and written?  Are they capturing names and addresses for their database from the websites?

So there are some good things to do here as part of tracking your market share and building on opportunities as a real estate agent or broker.  Make it a weekly process to track these facts and benchmarks; in this way the new business can be found with more focus and better conversions.