The 5 Point Sales Plan in Brokerage

It is too easy to ‘go with the flow’ as an agent in commercial real estate.  In other words, just letting things happen each day and adjusting around that.  

Without a planned approach to people, properties, and connections, the real estate business gets quite ordinary. 

Of course, there are times in the property market when things are so active, where that will still create a reasonable degree of listings and commissions.

Still, it is the other times (and most of the time) where competitive pressures take over and the property market swings between buying and selling. 

Top Agents Do This

Only the ‘top agents’ consistently find the volumes of business and attract the dominant market share.  They do that because they are working on a plan and a progressive incremental improvement in what they are doing each day. 

They are the extraordinary agents that have deliberately chosen to improve what they are doing, and they can see a ‘blueprint’ of ideas to do that.

If you are looking to attract more new business as an agent or broker, then think about what you do daily, and how that works for you. 

The property market changes for many different reasons, and you can adjust through that and with that.  Complacency and inaction are not the skills you need in brokerage. 

Actions and Systems

What can you do here? Try improving your actions each day with a plan or system that can help you reach out to new people and create more conversations.  Here are some ideas to help you get your real estate plan tuned to your business focus and targets:

1. Territory Defined – look at your allocated region for new business and split it up into location ‘modules’ or precincts where you can ‘go deeper’ into connecting with people and properties.  Travel the selected streets in the precinct and make notes about businesses, features, and property types.  Look for the facts about the location that will allow you to talk to other people.  It is a lot easier to make a telephone call to a property owner when you have recently travelled the streets and looked at the properties in the zone.  Take some photos to help you remember situations of properties and the location.
2. Client Types – every time you approach a client or a prospective client, the best way to get results is by ‘tuning’ your conversation.  That says you can be more ‘specific’ in your approach, and that can help you with advancing matters to a valuable lead and or meeting.  Prepare your conversational plan with people and do that in selected groups and or by type.  Focusing on industry segments (e.g. medical, logistics, manufacturing) can allow you to be specific in how you advance a conversation.
3. Property Types – choose your property types in your selected territory, so you can get plenty of information around you to support discussions, transactions, and negotiations.  You will need to know about rents, prices, time on the market, best methods of sale or lease, and marketing solutions that work in selected circumstances. Preparation is the key to accomplishing results with the different property types in your location. Capture all the information that you can regarding existing and previous transactions. Review all the facts and break them down into values per unit of space or area.  As a special note here, the values and the rents will change over time due to market circumstances. We as agents have very little to do with the market circumstances and prices, and yet we operate within that to achieve satisfactory results for our clients. What is your position? Think about this.  We are the best people to help our clients, the tenants, the business owners, and the buyers understand the common elements of the property market. Ensure that you have all the comparable property information to support any recommendation, discussion, or strategy made to a client.
4. Personal Marketing – there are things that you can do every day to reach out to new people in your location.  That then becomes a personal marketing plan. What does your marketing plan look like? Can it be improved over time? The top agents of the property market will work to a specific personal marketing plan and refine the actions and the activities that they work to within that. A program of this type can involve direct telephone calls, local area prospecting, marketing letters, online social media activities, and regular and ongoing meetings. Most agents, and particularly the top agents, will have three or four things that they implement in their marketing plan regularly. Choose the channels of marketing that you can work within and establish your system of personal promotion to implement each working day. The best and most straightforward way to market your services locally will be through the direct approach and simple professional conversations. There are many things that you can share about the property market as you connect with more people each day. The property investors and the business owners of the location will appreciate the updates relating to property activity, change, and availability.
5. Follow-up systems – if you are going to (and should) contact new people regularly, you have to create a follow-up system where constant ongoing approaches to the same people will help you find new business changes and the situations of client change and churn.  The ideas to consider around that constant continuous contact is that of relevance and local area specialisation. Create some reasons to connect with people.  Provide specific local area information relating to the property market, changes that could impact the people you are talking to, and strategies to help investors and business owners move ahead with their property ownership requirements. Simplicity and relevance are two factors to merge into your prospecting and client contact plan.   Create some ‘fields’ in your database or spreadsheet where you can track the information about people, conversations, and property ownership.  The next time you connect with the person, you will have something more specific to say and advance on.

So, all these factors allow you to create a real estate plan in your property business. You can take each of these five elements and develop strategies and activities that you can work to each day.

Recognise that property opportunity is always available for those agents that look for it. In any property market shift or change, there are still people looking to seize the opportunity of buying or selling or taking steps to move on a property challenge.