Seeding Ideas with Your Property Clients
In commercial property today, some of your clients may struggle to understand the variables available in working with any challenge across sales, leasing, or property management. You can productively approach any property challenge and provide an array of alternatives for the client to consider.
(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)
Importantly, you should offer specific and solid recommendations for each of your better clients, based on real market evidence and your property experience. Track the changes in your property market so you can prove to your clients, the elements of change and the opportunities afoot.
Extra leverage
The clients that we serve like to operate from a base of experience and decision. What can you do with that? Relevant market stories will help you show the client that you really understand their property challenge; you can help with the right property market or target segment and you can extract a positive solution for them. Be the guiding light to show the client exactly how to move through the property issue.
In simple terms, you can ‘seed ideas’ into the clients thinking and their property challenge over time. A small ‘seed’ or idea will generally grow in the client’s thinking. Top agent’s provide ‘seeded ideas’ to their good clients. Here are some ideas to help with that:
- Given that you may have already undertaken a variety of property transactions in the local area, carry with you a series of case studies and marketing samples that support any marketing or negotiating point. Understand how that fact or point may be important to the client situation. The resources that you carry with you should be easily available for recall and display. Put some of your resources online and in the cloud so that you can draw them down or in the right document format at the right time; a tablet computer or laptop computer will give you that flexibility. In today’s property market you must have access to the best online resources at the right time, so use ‘Google Drive’ or something similar to get to your marketing resources in a timely way.
- Some of your competitors may have listings on the market that are poorly promoted or overpriced. Listings of that type are usable in your presentation pitch as you help your clients understand how they can move ahead in the best ways given all the property facts.
- Chart the results from the property market over the last five years. The trends of sales and leasing activity can give you leverage when it comes to a listing today or property market negotiation for your client. The history of the property market will also give you leverage as you work through the client’s challenge. Use the facts of the property market to the fullest of the opportunities available.
- There are some significant differences of focus that apply to exclusive listings versus open listings. When you consider the alternatives are both, you should be able to show your clients a significantly shorter time on market for any exclusive listing locally. Open listings are nearly always a waste of time, and should only be taken for the sake of introducing a party to the property at a later time. If you want to get anywhere as an agent in the local commercial property market, you will need to master the art of exclusive property presentations and listing conversions. Build your property presentation around that strategy. Convert at least 80% of your property listings to exclusivity.
- As you take interested parties through listings as part of an inspection process, make specific notes relative to what parties are thinking and potentially offering. Some of that information will help you with client conditioning and correctly setting the right price or rental. An overpriced listing can always be a frustration; the first six weeks of any property campaign at the most important so don’t waste that precious time with a listing that is overpriced and poorly targeted.
There are some good things that you can do here when it comes to working with clients and directing their thought processes and negotiations. You can seed the right ideas into the client situation and the property listing.
Understand the property for its strengths and weaknesses so that you can negotiate effectively and directly in the best possible way. Information will help you achieve that most important goal.