The Advantages of Habitual Marketing in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

To attract better rates of property enquiry in commercial real estate brokerage, your marketing efforts should be ‘habitual’.  By that I mean doing the same things every day.  The ‘habitual’ process produces a solid personal profile and that’s when people remember you and or the property.  That is when market share can start to grow.  Of course people should remember you for the right reasons!

If you want to build your real estate business, think about what you do each day in self-promotion and how effective that may be.  A successful real estate brokerage is usually the result of the habitual marketing efforts of a team of good agents; spreading the marketing message effectively is a real skill.

So what can you do to get this concept under control and active in your marketing activities?  Try some of these:

1. Editorials – Write property editorials about the local area and how investments may be changing over time.  The newspapers are always looking for informative material that attracts readers.  You can talk about current property matters in your town or city; alternatively you can expand on community and business activity.  There are lots of valuable things to write about that will help your profile in the property pages of the local paper.
2. Signboards – Every agent should have a focus on getting signboards into their local area.  So many business owners and investors will see the sign and will make enquiry, especially if the property is well located or of a high quality.  That is where qualification becomes important, so be prepared to talk about ‘local matters’ and ‘property requirements’ with every client or prospect that rings you.  Top agents usually have lots of signs throughout their territory; soon they are accepted as the ‘go to agent’ to get a deal done.
3. Making outbound calls – The traditional telephone approach and cold calling still remains the most effective way to reach out to your property market, the investors, and the business owners.  Set yourself a ‘quota’ of outbound calls to make every day.  From that call process, determine how many meetings you will want per week with qualified parties.  Over time those ratios will improve, providing you set in place the ‘call habit’.
4. Niche marketing – You can and should concentrate your prospecting and promotional processes in a property type and a location.  That then helps you be seen as the ‘property specialist’ and not a ‘generic agent’.  When you concentrate in a niche segment of property in your town or city, it gets a lot easier to track listing opportunity, prices, rents, and results.
5. Internet profile – We all know the importance of online marketing in commercial property today.  That being said, there are some very specific things you can do.  For starters you can write a blog, lodge an article at the online article directories, post your comments on social media, and produce an email based newsletter.  Most agents only put out a newsletter and that is more of a random event than something that is intended.  To build a good ‘online profile’ the things that you do must be regular and specific.  The search engines only start to ‘see you’ when you do things in a regular way.

Habitual marketing doesn’t need to be complicated but it does need to be done.  Discipline is required to make the personal marketing process happen in commercial real estate brokerage today.