Listing Presentation Secrets for Commercial Real Estate Agents
The listing presentation you make today for any high quality property should be meticulously planned for the best client interaction and understanding. An average or ‘generic’ presentation has no great meaning to a client as they seek to solve a property problem. They are looking for the best agent with the best ideas.
Given that most listing presentations are ‘highly competitive’, you could reduce your fees and marketing costs to attract the client’s interest, but in doing so you are selling down the importance of the property and the client. It is far better to provide the client with solid strategies and solutions as the best foundations to selling or leasing the property.
The top agents in the property market do not generally ‘discount’ commissions or fees to simply win the listing. They sell their comprehensive property services using logic and relevance to the client situation. A client would rather entrust the sale or lease of their property to a confident and experienced agent, than someone reducing fees and costs. A confident agent that understands the market and the property type will always attract more business opportunities.
Here are some ideas to help you improve your listing presentation:
- The visual approach is far more successful in attracting the interest of the client. Use graphs and statistics to support your arguments in the listing presentation. It is very easy to put together visual material using the sales and leasing trends from the local area. Time on market will also be useful to help the client understand the rates of enquiry and the challenges experienced today to achieve a successful transaction.
- Have available some marketing material from successful campaigns in the local area. Show the client what has worked very successfully when it comes to attracting the interest of the target market.
- Gather the necessary facts relating to competing listings in the local area. Those facts will include prices, time on market, improvements, tenancy mix, yields, and marketing strategy. The local town or city may have an abundance of listings through an oversupply. If that is the case, your marketing approach needs to be well planned and strategically implemented. Track and measure the results that you get from every property campaign so you can specifically recommend the best marketing solutions for the clients that you serve.
- Show the client exactly how many listings they are competing against and then give them some alternative marketing solutions to help their property stand out as relevant and attractive against the competing properties.
- Take the agency team through the listing as soon as possible. Other members of the team are likely to have valuable comments and ideas to help the marketing process. It is questionable whether you would want to involve the client in that process, however the feedback may be useful in a later meeting with the client.
- If the property is vacant, establish a display area internally to the property where you can place a display board and brochures to help the inspection process. On the display board you can include photographs and plans relating to the property.
- To help the client understand how you will be providing feedback and information from inspections, show them the recent sample feedback form and include with that form your recommendations for marketing change.
- The inbound enquiries that come to you from every marketing campaign will provide valuable information relating to exactly what the buyers and tenants and the market are looking for. That feedback will include price ranges and rental rates, types of improvements, size of property, location, and required services and amenities. You can create a checklist or feedback form to use with every marketing campaign and in every inspection. The results that you achieve from the checklist can be tracked for use in other listing presentations.
- Your marketing solutions need to be specific and relevant to the property. Develop three alternative advertisements to be used in the different media channels and online portals. Any quality listing that is exclusively listed should be marketed directly using alternative advertisements and advertising layouts. You will find that some advertisements work far more successfully than others; the same can be said for advertising content, layouts, and photographs.
- Most of the property enquiry today comes from the local area within a town or city. Business owners and property investors understand the local area for the opportunities that arise. On that basis they can make informed decisions quickly and directly on any purchase or rental opportunity. Focus most of your marketing into the local area; this process will also help you with future listing leads and opportunities.
So the message here is quite clear. The listing process and the presentation made to the client are quite specific for the property, the challenge that the client needs resolved, and the existing activity within the local property precinct. Make every listing presentation relevant and real to the client’s situation. Provide valuable market intelligence and logic to help solve the client’s property challenge.