The 3 Key Rules for Establishing a New Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
In commercial real estate brokerage today there is no point in being ordinary or average when it comes to listing quality and business attraction. There will always be plenty of competition in the location for you to work against and win listings. Understand your town or city for what it is, and then determine how you can position yourself and your brokerage for the best results over time. A specialist approach to the industry will usually achieve significantly more new business than a general commercial agency.
Get the Local Facts
Understand how you can specialise in commercial real estate, and then determine the property types that offer the best levels of opportunity. So you will need to assess the current market conditions, the factors of growth, and the prevailing levels of competition. Check out the property history of the area, assess the current market conditions, and determine the levels of future opportunity within segments and locations.
Start Your Plan
When you delve deeply into the prevailing market conditions, you will see the opportunity for what it is, and then you will understand how to tap into it as a brokerage or as an individual. Planning is required. Specific and direct marketing processes are highly effective today in most locations and with most property types. That means you should specialise in every way possible to pull in the new business that you need, ensuring that the business is of high quality.
Check Out the Competition
Look at both the local brokerages and the agents and then identify a how they position themselves. What makes them stand out? Why should a client use their services over yours? When you understand the answers, you can start to develop your marketing campaign and attract more listings over time.
Here are 3 specific rules that will help you establish a new market profile in commercial real estate brokerage, and potentially build your local property business faster and more directly:
- LOCALITY: Divide your property precincts and territories into points of focus, and priority streets. Determine where the high quality buildings and properties are located within those zones. Property investors and business owners will have a focus of occupation and ownership within those locations, and you will need to understand why that is the case. When you understand the places of priority you can focus on refining your activities of prospecting and client contact. The best properties and the best clients produce greater levels of enquiry and property churn. Low quality listings stay on the market for too long and can be a drag on both your time and your income.
- BETTER CLIENTS: Define the ideal client profile. Some clients are better than others and you will need to decide what that means to you. Will you be focusing on clients of a particular size or a particular type? In most cases you will be working with property investors and business owners. In each case you will need to set some specific criteria and factors of qualification that you can use as part of prospecting, so you can focus down into those two groups specifically and directly. Understand what they are looking for when it comes to local property occupancy and ownership. Merge some local property knowledge and market awareness into your prospecting activities.
- BETTER PROPERTIES: Define the ideal property type to focus on. Will you be working on office, industrial, or retail property types? Within the selected property groups of properties, will you be working within sales, leasing, or property management? How can you make your services stand out as specific and real to the clients that you serve? There is no point in being ordinary when it comes to commercial real estate today; the levels of competition are significant and real in most locations. The best agents develop points of difference as part of their business activities and prospecting models.
So there are some specific things that you can do here when establishing a new commercial real estate brokerage, or when you need to create a personal churn and market share as an individual agent.
The message here is that you need to be quite specific and focused when it comes to building your business locally. Understand your skills and your strengths. Build your real estate business based on your relevance to the market and the points of difference that you can provide.
Improve your skills, and practice your client interaction. Everything that you do in commercial real estate today should be centred on business generation first and foremost. New clients and good quality listings will attract other business around you. That’s what the top agents do most of the time.
The generic approach to commercial real estate today really doesn’t work. You have to stand out as the agent of choice within your location and within your property speciality.
You can get more commercial real estate brokerage planning tips in our eCourse Snapshot right here.
