Practice Your Negotiation Skills This Way for Better Results in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate today, most of the people that we interact with are very experienced with property situations and challenges.  They know the factors and the pressures of negotiation from their perspective; some of those people will be very familiar with positioning and posturing for a successful negotiation.  It directly follows that you should be practicing and developing your negotiation skills on a regular basis to handle the variations of people and properties that you work on.

There are so many variables happening in our property market that a good degree of monitoring and assessment is required of the key performance indicators.  When you understand how things are changing in your area with local property, you can tune your negotiation skills.  Practice is really important.

Your Negotiation Skills?

Think about these things and your current negotiation skills:

• Changes currently – There are regular shifts going on in the property market where prices and rents become more or less achievable from a typical transaction. Are the prices and rents going up or down for you and your listings or property segments?  What has the enquiry been like?  How can you do more direct marketing to pull in the right types of people that can do something with the listings that you have now?  Think about it as you will find some points of leverage there.
• Levels of enquiry – With some listings you will have limited levels of enquiry. Some properties are so special that you may only have a few buyers or tenants to work with.  Your SWOT analysis done earlier should have alerted you to limited levels of enquiry.  In that case your marketing campaigns should be highly targeted and a good degree of personal involvement will be required to get people across the line to lift the enquiry rates.
• Time of year – There is always a right and a wrong time to sell or lease a property. Understand the selling seasons for your locations and how businesses and investors respond at different times of year.
• Targets for clients – Every client that you work with will have targets that they have set in moving a property to sale or lease. Those targets may be more or less realistic when it comes to prices, rents, and time on market; it is quite likely that the client will not tell you the full story when it comes to their targets and challenges. Choose your clients and property listings well so that you are working with realistic situations that are negotiable.
• Quality of property – A property and its particular details and fixed improvements will have strengths and weaknesses for you to work through. It pays to do a SWOT analysis for your own purposes with every listing before you start a campaign or listing process.
• Zoning and precinct issues – Some property precincts have issues that are locally driven. It’s not too difficult to sell or lease a property that is realistically priced in a popular location.  Unfortunately many properties are less fortunate when it comes to location and or improvements.  Understand the issues with your listed properties before you take them to the market.  Practice your dialogue when it comes to the things that buyers and tenants are likely to debate as part of any inspection.

You can now see why it’s so important to develop and refine your negotiation skills in commercial real estate brokerage.

You can get more commercial property negotiation skills tips in our eCourse ‘Snapshot’ right here.