The 9 Critical Sales Skills in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

There are certain skills in commercial real estate brokerage that you do need to work on and improve over time.  Given the changes to the property market each year, those skills are so essential to progress for every agent

Client contact systems, your database, and your listing inventories grow through constant activities. They are the critical sales skills that evolve at a personal level, and they exist across sales and leasing activity.

Are you ready to grow your real estate business? Check out these special real estate skills below and consider how you would ‘rank’ yourself in comparision to others in the market.

Refining the right professional sales skills

If you are looking to improve market share, listings, and business activity, then consider these skills specifically as they relate to your business and your market share.

1. Prospecting for new clients and contacts – get to know plenty of people in your local area and convert some of those people to clients at the right time. Your prospecting process should be quite specific and relevant for the local area and preferred property types.  Be specific about the categories of client that you wan to work with. Clarity with that will help you find your prospects. Start your contact list and keep it growing.
2. Systemize your prospecting model – that is so it becomes a daily event in your diary of activities.  Take a direct ownership of the prospecting system as it applies to your location and you personally.  Understand how you are connecting with new people, and track your conversions and numbers.  Over time, ensure that your numbers in your database are improving.
3. Qualifying the people that you should spend more time with or on – certain people will be more valuable to you than others from a client perspective. Define the types of people that you should be working with now and determine how you can connect with them in an ongoing way. Of course, some people will be ‘big time wasters’, so consider the value of particular people to you and how ‘genuine’ they may be. Trust is a big issue in commercial real estate and all the relationships that you develop.
4. Creating meetings with qualified people – most of the new business that you do create will be via meetings and connections. It directly follows that you can be generating at least two new meetings per day with new people, in addition to the ordinary meetings you may be having with existing people and contacts.  The ‘meeting formula’ works in allowing you to build a local brand for yourself and attract more listings
5. Moving an opportunity forward – when you come across a person with a property challenge, the next stage of the process is to help that person see that you are a big part of the solution that they need. Communication skills and trust will help that process occur. Sometimes our clients and prospects can’t see the next step or the need for change. A top agent guides the client or prospect forward with ideas, information, and recommentations.
6. Listing a property exclusively – know how to list a property on an exclusive basis. Avoid the listings that you cannot control.  We spend so much time on prospecting for listings; the control process should apply to those listings that you convert.  Control your listing stock and design specific promotional campaigns in each case. Time on market is always shorter with exclusive listing stock. Have plenty of ideas, recommendations, and strategies for your clients to use in closing on an exclusive basis.
7. Marketing a property comprehensively – when you have a quality listing on your books, use the fullest marketing campaign possible that suits the target market. The message about the property and the location must be convered comprehensively in a period of just a few weeks, so you can get the inspection momentum that you require.  Ask for vendor paid marketing as part of the process. A quality marketing campaign will produce enquiries in any town or city and in any economic cycle.
8. Holding inspections with qualified buyers or tenants – when you have an enquiry coming to you for a controlled listing, qualify and match the enquiry to the right property before you move to an inspection. Know that the person making the enquiry has the full capability to transact a sale or lease, as the case may be.  Ask key questions to get to those facts.
9. Selling the strengths of a property – every property will have strengths that you can use in marketing, inspecting, and negotiating. With every listing, ensure that you have identified those items so that the result negotiation is optimised. From your perspective and in taking on any listing, do a SWOT analysis with each listing, so you are tuning your efforts and the marketing to the target market.
10. Closing on a transaction – it has been said that a successful commercial property transaction is a culmination of several small decisions and agreements. The observation is correct. As the facilitator of the transaction, understand how to move a sale or lease negotiation forward to a positive outcome. Learn and practice your skills. Look for the key elements that could motivate the parties to the transaction and then communicate comprehensively across those things.

So, these are the main sales skills to optimise and improve over time.  These are the things that you can improve and practice over time.