Make Your Commercial Real Estate Prospecting a New Business Pipeline
One big thing that makes all the difference in commercial real estate brokerage is a ‘prospecting pipeline’. The ‘pipeline’ is something that should happen at a personal broker level, and every day it should be refined with fresh updates and expanded with new people. It becomes the ‘engine’ of opportunity.
If you are serious about getting results in your commercial real estate business then you should grasp the concept and implement the idea. You can make a prospecting pipeline work for you across sales, leasing, and property management. The time that you apply to the process each day will help in lifting your new business opportunities.
All segments of the industry require the client contact strategy. Many times you will hear of agents that have let the contact process fall away and consequently the prospecting pipeline slows or stops. That is then the time when income and market share contract.
Prospecting Pipeline Strategies
Here are some ideas to make the pipeline work for you personally:
- Territory – Define your primary territory of prospecting and listing focus. In that zone you should understand everything that is happening by way of listings, prices, rents, new developments, time on market, and zoning changes.
- Set Prospect Criteria – It is hard to attract new clients when you really haven’t set and put criteria on them. Some people will waste your time as a broker so understand the types of local clients that are the best to work for and where you can connect with them.
- Method of approach – How are you going to connect with new people? Why should they listen to you? Those two simple questions are really important to helping you convert listing opportunities. You can work with a few prospecting processes at the same time so you are not ‘putting all your eggs in the one basket’. Some things will work better for you than others in generating new business; understand what those things are and comprehensively work them.
- Typical pipeline – In commercial real estate you have a few methods of approach at your disposal to get a contact up and going. Most initial opportunities are created by telephone calls, direct letters, and door knocking. When you have started the connection with a prospect and from that point onwards, the pipeline takes over and that will be a series of contact strategies over a set period of time. The stages could be telephone calls, meetings, newsletter, market update, social media interaction, and personal market briefing. Over time you repeat the process with the same people. The quality of information that you provide will support future contact so make sure you are providing something of interest and value to the prospect.
- Track your actions and stages of contact – It takes time to convert some prospects to the next stage of your pipeline process. Persistence brings results so keep on track and focused on the best people that you talk to. It can take months and sometimes years to move a client to the next stage of action on a property matter. If you know that they have a property relevancy to you, then stay active and on task.
These 5 simple stages create that pipeline process to feed new business leads and opportunities towards you. Get your systems going so that progress is achieved across your local territory.