Taking Action in Commercial Real Estate Wins More Business
In the commercial property market today there are plenty of things for agents and brokers to focus on and opportunities to create. In many respects there can be too many things happening, and therefore your efforts as a property specialist can be diluted and lost across an unrealistic area or too many property types.
Understand the advantages of specialised focus so that you can direct your business efforts into a location of suitable size and variations of property activity. To identify those factors you can do an assessment of historic sales and leasing activity for the area over the last two or three years. You can also assess the levels of current business activity and consider the business growth for the zone. Some agents struggle for too long in an area with little growth and weak business sentiment. Understand what is happening around you when it comes to the property market, local businesses, and property investors.
As a general recommendation, focus your new business efforts within zones of approximately 2000 properties; in that way you can really get to know what is happening when it comes to sales, leasing, rents, prices, and new developments. A small area of focus will give you that extra confidence when it comes to pitching your marketing recommendations to the client. It is also hard for the client to refute or reject market evidence.
Here are some ideas to help you establish your action plan and build your new business opportunities through the local property market:
- Spend more time out of the office on a regular basis meeting new people and inspecting properties. That focus will help you attach and identify yourself to the activities of the property market, the clients, and the prospects. Spend as little time as possible in the office and only do so for the purposes of using the telephone or undertaking the necessary paperwork for your listings or clients.
- Devote 30% of your day to prospecting and make a commitment to the process in your diary. When you devote more time to prospecting you will create better levels of enquiry, close more listings, and grow your database. Manage your diary yourself so that your prospecting time can be optimised.
- Merge your action plan into your business plan, as they both go hand in hand. The actions that you take every day should be built around the targets that you have established in your business plan. Understand the things that really matter when it comes to building your market share and then focus on those two or three things in a regular an ongoing way.
- Understand your targets and goals to the point that you have numbers and ratios to monitor. Break your big targets down into incremental steps and goal achievements. For example you could be tracking the number of cold calls each week, the number of meetings that you create, the number of listings generated, and the levels of commission from closed successful transactions.
- Market yourself as well as your properties in a comprehensive way. Far too many agents just focus on the marketing of property; be overlooked the fact that they are the property specialist and on that basis should be marketing themselves accordingly. Establish strategies relating to social media, editorials, articles, industry statements, industry briefings, and client visitations. High quality listings are also a good excuses to talk to the people in your property market; they will give you the extra leverage when it comes to personalised marketing.
- Understand your ideal property type in a comprehensive way. Your ideal property type should be that which offers the best opportunity of income and listing growth. Look at the trends in the market today so that you can identify where the next listings will come from and how they will need to be promoted.
- Understand your ideal client from a location and category perspective. Your ideal client should be qualified by location, property interest, available capital or budget, and timing. Get to know your ideal client and their immediate or future property needs. From that point onwards it is simply a matter of focusing your prospecting activities to the ideal client profile.
So there are plenty of things that you can do here when it comes to taking direct action in your local property market. Every commercial real estate agent and broker should have an action plan that is definite by design and directed by local market conditions. Consider your plan and focus your efforts accordingly.