The 5 Key Secrets of Starting a Career in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
When you start your career in commercial real estate, things can seem to be a bit ‘uphill’ and pressured. There are things to learn, practice, and action every day.
Behind all that you do, there are clients to find, listings to build, marketing activities to initiate, and transactions to encourage. Systems and actions are a good way to get your real estate business started and established.
Know the industry for what it is and where it can take you. When you think about it, the rewards are many and significant for those agents and brokers that can get their business active and optimized to improve.
I go back to the point that ‘systems’ are a good strategy to bring into a real estate career; early action in that way will help an agent or broker find the opportunities that they are looking for.
Start Planning and Take Action
Here is a plan to help you get started:
- Determine the clients and properties that you would like to work on. It is a simple idea, but an important one. What you are doing here is refining your focus on the right property types and people. That then allows you to build your prospecting and new business activities with some focus.
- Get the research done from the very start of your career and focus on both clients and properties. You never stop the research process, and that is because things change through the year and in any property precinct; stay ahead of the changes. So, with all this research, what you are doing here is getting closer to the client and property opportunities. The research helps you see things and move on the factors that have some potential for you and your business requirements.
- Make your prospecting and communication systems easy and natural. Momentum is important in commercial brokerage, so make all your client and prospect contact systems easy to do and maintain. You must talk to new people every day, so all the systems to support that should be simple and easy.
- Get outdoors and get personal in your actions. Don’t ‘hide behind’ some email or telephone call. Get out into your property precinct and meet the people. It is remarkable just how much information you will get from a conversation; be friendly and direct as you speak to new people. Set a target to meet or converse with 5 new people per day at a personal level. Door knock some local businesses, canvass some property owners, talk to tenants, and generally talk to anyone that could have a property need or interest.
- Track your progress with a comprehensive and easy to use database program. With all the technology around us today, there are software programs that will easily let you record facts, and communicate with key people in a regular and professional way. Put the database system at the center of your business model and grow your client list every day. Soon you will find the information that leads to an inspection, offer, listing, or transaction.
Taking these facts together, you can see that frequency of personal contact builds a real estate business. While all this contact is happening on a systematic basis, you can grow your local area building knowledge and property skills. Effort and actions get results; the harder you work and in doing so refine your skills, the greater the opportunities you will find in commercial real estate brokerage.
