Important Ways to Refresh Your Listings in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate, your listings should be refreshed from a marketing perspective once every 14 days.  In that way you can potentially lift the enquiry rate and have a reasonable chance of more property inspections.

So what is the problem here?  Most agents and brokers put a listing onto the market and just let it sit without any attention to the target market, or with a marketing adjustment.  Now I can understand that approach with ‘open listings’, but not with ‘exclusive listings’.  If you have an exclusive listing (or perhaps a few exclusives), then it’s time to look at a listing refresh.

So what is this all about and what does ‘refresh’ really mean?  Have a look at these ideas:

1. On a weekly basis you can track the enquiry rates for all your ‘exclusives’; understand what is helping property enquiry, and what isn’t working.  Make adjustments accordingly.
2. For every high quality property, create 3 different types of advertisements to run in the different media streams so you can understand what format is more successful in creating inbound enquiry.  When you know what is working, do more of it.
3. Different media types should be used with any quality listing.  You will have some choices to work with such as advertising layout, dot points, banner headline, call to action, photographs, and pricing.
4. Different methods of sale or lease will have variable levels of success; some more than others relative to the quality of the listing.  Timed methods of sale such as ‘auction’, ‘expressions of interest’, or ‘tender’ all have advantages in activating the buyers that are out there.
5. Professionally written advertising copy should be created for every quality exclusive listing.  The cost of the process should be written into the marketing campaign.
6. High quality photographs and videos will help with the level of enquiry that you generate.  The cost of that strategy should also be included in the campaign marketing funds.
7. Many agents use the email and online newsletter process to link to their qualified buyers and tenants.  With every repeat despatch of the property detail, change the layout and the message; send out your listings in groups of relevancy.
8. Portals and banner advertising will help most property marketing efforts; there is however a cost to the process and some clients will struggle with the ‘premium cost’ that the portals will impose.  Help the client make the right choices that they can afford when it comes to online marketing, and then refresh the listing regularly with different copy and photographs.

The message here is simple.  Refresh the marketing of your exclusive listings regularly so you can improve the rate of inquiry and inspections created.