Local Businesses Bring Property Opportunity to Brokers
As you move through your career in commercial real estate brokerage, you will always find plenty of listing activity to tap into across and into the business community. Local businesses will be changing throughout the year with property expansion, contraction, and or relocation. You can be the person to help those businesses with their property challenges across sales and/or leasing activity.
(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)
Companies and corporations are frequently looking for local property experts to take them through their property challenge and business change. If you focus your prospecting efforts into the better quality and larger companies and corporations, the opportunities you are seeking in property commercially will be there.
What can you do?
So how can you tap into this fresh and new opportunity? In simple terms you stay close to the business leaders in your town or city. Get to know what they are both thinking and needing to take their business efforts forward; build the relationships and trust with the right people. Provide the right local property information at the right time and then stay in touch. Here are some rules to help with that process:
- Local News – watch the local newspapers for business change and or announcements relating to companies and corporations. A simple article relating to the performance of a business, the changes to company executives, or the announcements at the end of the financial year relating to a business segment or company will always lead to valuable market intelligence. Set the search engine on your computer to update you when articles are active relative to your city, property specialty, or commercial property segment. Read the articles and extract the names of business executives, decision makers, and entrepreneurs. Those names can be entered into your database for future follow-up and or reference.
- Observe local property changes – travel through your property territory on a regular and frequent basis. Cover all of the streets and the priority buildings at least monthly so that you can observe new listing activity, changes to companies and corporations, and any vacancies or redevelopment opportunities.
- Stay in touch with local business identities – create conversations with local business leaders and business owners. They will soon tell you what they are seeing and hearing from the location with a particular focus into their street and/or building. A simple snippet of local market information can lead to a property listing over time.
- Certain business segments will be more successful than others – look for the industry segments that are creating change and churn. Industrial change will always be impacted by economic circumstances and corporate performance. Changes within the labor force and the availability of raw materials will also have an impact on business activity. Understand those elements within your location so that you can reach out into the business segments feeling the pressures of change and churn.
So there are some good things that you can do here to set the right foundations in your commercial real estate brokerage career. All of these things are based on observations made and interaction with the companies and corporations in your local area.
Get started
You can easily start this process through a logical and direct cold calling process using the business telephone book as a source of raw information. Make the calls, and you will find the opportunities. That is how commercial real estate is transacted today. Talk to the people and you will find the factors of change and churn to take you to a sales or leasing opportunity.
