Search for the Right Ways to Improve Your Commercial Real Estate Agent Performance
One of the big challenges in real estate agency is performance, and that is how to stay focused on the right things that help bring you the right business leads and opportunity. Search for ways to stay on track and on task. Understand the things that work for you and do those things every day. Personal improvement and performance are critical elements of business activity for agents today.
Commercial real estate is a bit different than residential property in that you are connecting into a market that is predominantly business like and driven by logic rather than emotion. Yes, there will be the negotiations on price or rent, but the negotiations and decisions are logic driven.
Know the Facts
To close on any commercial real estate deal it is necessary to know a lot about the market conditions with other investment properties and those that are owner occupied. Here are some factors for your awareness:
- Prices per unit of area
- Rents per unit of area
- Rental types
- Best methods of sale
- Comparable properties
- Unsold and vacant properties
- Time on market for properties today
- Costs of improvements by building type and location
- Values of unimproved vacant land
- Costs to develop unimproved land
With these things you can pitch your negotiation based on real facts and market evidence.
Your personal progress
Here are some ideas to help you improve your performance as an agent in today’s property market:
- Concentration – Focus on a market segment geographically and logically move through it street by street and property by property. Add to that a limited number of property types so you can be concentrating on the facts and the activities of the property type; typically office, industrial, and retail property are the specialised segments although you may refine that further.
- Systems – The things that you do every day are the things to take you forward. Understanding your strengths as an agent will help you with systemising important activities such as client contact, prospecting for new business, marketing campaigns, and inspection processes. Focus on your skills at the top end of the real estate business where listings and leads are generated. You can do things when you have listings to work on.
- Stay fresh every day – Most of us work a 5 or 6 day working week. Some of those days are 10 hours plus, so you must stay fresh and alert to the business opportunities around you. Exercise and ‘break away’ time will help you get through the working day with momentum and results. Do some of the things that help you stay fresh and alert to new business leads.
- Skill development – It really doesn’t matter how long you have been in the property market; skill development is a big issue in our industry. The critical business factors such as marketing, negotiation and documentation all require ongoing personal improvement. When the opportunities are before you for a sale or a lease, you need the skills to move ahead with confidence and accuracy in the situation. Personal practice and role playing are good ways to do that within the sales and leasing team.
So the message here is quite clear. We are all responsible for our results and personal performance as agents in commercial real estate. Establish the focus and the systems to take you forward as an industry specialist.
(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)
