Simple Formulas to Follow to Find Your Ideal Commercial Real Estate Market
As you move through the commercial real estate year, understand the market conditions and the pressures and changes that apply locally. Look for the opportunities, and work with the best clients for the location.
(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)
You can get to know your city and suburbs specifically. Research the roads and better buildings and watch the trends. See how change is impacting the local area and property occupation and ownership. Good observations lead to opportunities in commercial property.
Your Local Town or City Property Trends
There will be opportunities for the taking in property change and with business activity, and the first agents to see that action are usually those that are best placed to convert the new business. Be that new business in sales, leasing, and property management, the commissions are all good as are the clients that we work with. What is the ideal new business for you currently?
What Do You Like?
What do you prefer to work with? Try some of these for starters:
- Leasing vacant premises
- Finding buyers that require high quality premises to trade from
- Tenant mix upgrades
- Property redevelopments
- Tenant advocacy work
- Buyers agent
- Sellers agent, etc.
Work with the VIP clients that have the multiple needs and ongoing property challenges. Establish a VIP client process to open up the ideas and client services that you can see are valuable to your brokerage. Understand what a VIP client is to you and what they want; refine your prospecting processes to target into that sector.
When you focus your prospecting efforts within a particular zone or territory, you can see where the factors of supply and demand are changing. That then allows you to connect with the right people in a relevant and real way for the location. Hone your prospecting model accordingly.
Strategic Ideas
To build some success in commercial real estate brokerage, you need to be strategic and active; it’s a personal process that you cannot delegate to others. You need to think about the things that you are doing, and then you need to track the results. Use your database as part of that systematic approach to your clients and market.
Here are some ideas to help you identify the opportunities in your real estate market:
- Identify the level of competition from other agents that you will need to work through and compete against. Some agents will be strong in the location, whilst others will be random in what they do with clients and listings.
- Review the changes for the location within the business community and the local property investors. There will be trends that you can grasp and work with. Where are businesses wanting to move? What are they expecting as they choose properties for rent or occupation?
- Go through your client list and segment those clients by value and location. Set some of those people up into a VIP segment of your database.
- Ask for referral business at each and every opportunity as you connect with new people every day. There will be easier new business to convert from the existing people and clients that you know currently.
- With every listing that you take to the market, directly promote the property into the local area including all business owners and property owners.
- Track the levels of inquiry that are coming to you from listings and inspections. Over time you will see patterns to inquiry and property inspections. Exclusive listings will generally attract better control and listing conversion.
- Understand the properties that are more active in both sales and leasing for the location. Can you get a slice of that action from your competitors?
Try to build your property management portfolio from sales and leasing activity as you look into a location you will find the business that you are looking for.
(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)