The Easy Way to Use Assistants in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate brokerage today, the use of assistants will help many agents and salespeople get to the critical issues of the day.  In sales, leasing and property management, there will be many mundane tasks and important tasks.  Having your top agents handle the ‘mundane’ is counterproductive to new business generation and market share.  Commissions and listings over the long term will suffer.

So you should move the ‘ordinary brokerage tasks’ to a team of ‘property assistants’ or the administration support in your office so that then frees up the best agents to get back out into the market to find more listings and create inspections.  The process pays dividends over time, even though you have the cost of the process in salaries and wages.

You can have one ‘assistant’ appointed to a team of two or three agents or brokers.  You then set the rules as to what tasks will be handled in the process.

As easy as this seems, the process requires cooperation and planning on the part of the sales team.  The members of the team must work to the rules and the system, otherwise the support people will be distracted and diverted on things that do not matter.

So what can these administrative assistants do?  Here are some ideas to get the issue started:

1. They can answer telephone calls coming in to the office for the agents and the sales team.  They can then be a filtering point to set appointments and keep time wasting meetings away from the agents.
2. Do the daily research required for cold calling and prospecting.  Each day they can gather a set of telephone numbers and contact points for property investors, owners, and tenants that can be contacted by the agents.
3. They can manage and load the database for the agents so all information client and prospect information is up to date.  That being said, the agents will have to provide the accurate updates in a form that can be recorded accurately.  Remember the rule of ‘rubbish in and rubbish out’, when it comes to databases.
4. Each week the advertising and marketing campaign work can be managed and loaded by the assistants.  They should also be tracking internet listing numbers, signboard counts, and newspaper advertising.
5. Marketing materials and proposals can be prepared by the support team so that the agents are ready to go out to ‘win the new business’ with the best tools and proposal solutions that are matched to the client and each property.
6. Each week the support team can prepare the email newsletters of property updates, listings, and information from the website.  In a larger agency it is wise to have a separate newsletter for each property type; in a larger city it is wise to have a newsletter for separate zones or locations.

It is easy to see that the administrative support team will be of high value to the brokers and agents in your brokerage.  Create a support process that works for the business and the top agents in your employ.