The 4 Critical Numbers that Mean So Much in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
When you are looking to build your commercial real estate brokerage business, the best way to do that is by developing contact and networking systems at a personal level, and then tracking your numbers within certain Key Performance Indicators. Those numbers will help you see where your opportunities are growing and results are being achieved.
Incremental improvement across key areas in commercial real estate will help you build market share. The market share that you develop can be specifically for sales, leasing, or property management. The clients within each category have specific needs. It is your job to understand those needs.
Your approach to those clients and prospects in the local area should be quite specific taking into account the pressures and the opportunities that apply to commercial real estate sales, leasing, or property management. Understand the differences between the property disciplines. Have due regard to the property types of industrial, retail, and office commercial.
So let’s take this a bit further. Look at the factors of supply and demand in the local area applying across the property types. Vacancy factors or new property developments will have an impact on the pressures of supply and demand within each property segment. Visit the local planning office on a monthly basis so you can check the upcoming property developments and the approvals in the pipeline.
So the issue here is to track the relevant numbers that apply in your local town or city. Here are some ideas and strategies to help with that:
- New prospects – The best way to build your market share as a real estate agent is to continually focus on connecting with new people in the local area. Those people may be business owners or Property Investors. It is a matter of tracking them down (that is a researching process undertaken at a personal level), making the initial approach of introduction, and continuing the direct contact in a relevant way into the future. Set a minimum target for new contacts to be made every day. Ideally you should be connecting with the least 15 new people every day. That will require research and planning; consider how you can merge those factors into your daily diary and activities.
- Cold calling – Understand how many calls you are making every day to new people. The cold calling process should take into account the rules and regulations that apply in your location to the ‘do not call register’. Understand the local laws and rules that apply to the process; there are differences that apply when you approach individual people verses businesses as part of the contact process. The object of making the calls is to create relevant meetings with new people. Generally speaking, you will not achieve new business from the first meeting that you create. Valuable relationships however will start from that meeting process and over time those relationships will lead to business opportunities, leads, and referrals.
- Conversions – Most meetings will be the start of longer term client relationships. The idea is then to monitor the number of meetings that you create with the prospects in your database. From those meetings the new business leads will evolve; trust has a lot to do with the new business opportunities you create. So the numbers track here to be tracked will be centred on meetings per week, and leads per week. Some of the leads will then convert to listings, or opportunities for buying or leasing commercial real estate.
- Listings – Exclusive listings are desirable in many respects. The exclusive listing process will help you as the real estate agent with the control of listing stock, the clients, and your negotiations. Ideally you can work with up to approximately 15 exclusive listings at any one time. Beyond that point you will be far too busy to provide quality professional service. If you find that you are converting a solid number of exclusive listings regularly over time, you may need a personal assistant to help you with the marketing and documentation processes. That is how many top agents increase their market share locally. So the key factor here is to track the number of exclusive listings that you are converting on a weekly and monthly basis. From those listings you will need to know your success factors, time on market, and the conversion to completed transactions.
You really do not need to over complicate your career in commercial real estate. Understand the number process as it applies to growth of market share and your client database. Create the key performance indicators to help you with the above factors.