Market Transparency in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Leads to Listing Success
Whilst most commercial real estate clients and particularly property owners may claim to have a good knowledge of property in their local area, they are likely to lack a full understanding of just what is happening with prices, rents, and marketing activity. You can help them with that.
I like to call the concept a strategy of ‘market transparency’. When you are open and comprehensively direct on providing valuable property market information, it is hard for a client to ignore any recommendations and ideas.
Use Local Commercial Property Facts
Here are some ideas to help you provide that specialist property knowledge or ‘transparency’ at the right time and in the right way:
- MARKETING: Track actual marketing results from all of your best listings. Soon you will know what is producing the best levels of inbound enquiry.
- ENQUIRY RESULTS: Certain listings will give you a good idea of what buyers and tenants are looking for with properties today in your town or city. You can list and chart those results for your clients and merge the findings into your property presentations.
- TYPES OF BUYERS AND TENANTS: Your business community is likely to be active in certain segments. Some of those segments will be more successful than others and perhaps even expanding or changing. When you find a section of your business community that is ‘property active’ then drill down into all the businesses within that section so that you can find and identify what they are looking for.
- TIME ON MARKET: At different times of the year, the time on market for certain listings will change. Track the time on the market with different property types in different locations. Soon you will have some clear recommendations you can make to your clients.
- BEST METHODS OF SALE OR LEASE: Some methods of sale or lease will be markedly more successful than others. It directly follows that you can understand what works and help your clients move towards that marketing process.
- BEST TIME OF YEAR: There is no point in marketing a property if the expected inquiry from the target market is potentially slow. Choose the best time of year to undertake any marketing process. Avoid periods where holidays and competing properties could be in conflict with the end result that you seek. Help the client see that and your reasons and recommendations for doing so.
- PRICE AND RENT RANGES: One of the biggest problems in our commercial real estate industry is in overpricing or in the inflated expectations of the client with their listing. If you have a good set of comparable properties with the associated prices and rents to talk about, then the client would be foolish to overlook the facts of the market today.
- LISTING NUMBERS: At certain times of the year there may be a lot of listings on the property market and associated inquiry could be slow. The equation of time on the market will also have a bit to do with that as will the supply and demand for space to purchase or occupy. Track listing numbers and understand the differences that apply to open and exclusive listings by comparison in certain property types.
Market transparency is a special process that can help you convert more new listings and new business.
