The Essential Meeting Planner for Commercial Real Estate Brokers

In commercial real estate brokerage you should focus on creating new meetings with new people as part of a prospecting and client generation process.  In other words you really do need to have a ‘meeting planner’ that puts you in front of ever more people each and every working day.

So who do you need to meet with?  Look for the people that could need help with property sales, leasing, or management.  The alternatives are many when it comes to meeting generation.

Some agents and brokers fail to focus on new business opportunities and new clients in a consistent and ongoing way.  They don’t have enough meetings booked or active in any given working week. This then creates problems at a later time when the property market changes or they run out of clients.  Meetings are important to new business.

Focus on New Meetings

In every type of property market there is a need to focus on new business generation.  It doesn’t matter how busy you are today with listings and clients; you need to build a pipeline of new business opportunity in your database through consistent and regular ongoing contact with the right people.

So let’s go back to the concept of the meeting planner.  The planner is designed with one target in mind and that is to help you reach out to new people in your local property market.

Here are some ideas to help you structure your meeting planner with a view to expanding market opportunity and client contact:

1. Client types – determine who the best clients would be for you in today’s property market. Will you need to focus on property investors or business leaders as part of your prospecting model?  How can you find them?  You can define your clients by type, location, and portfolio.  When you understand the clients that you should be connecting with, it makes your prospecting efforts a lot easier.
2. Visually based material – in creating meetings with clients and prospects, you will need a good variety of marketing material and industry updates from the local area to use as part of the meeting process. The best material to use would be visually based such as graphs, charts, and photographs.  Marketing material that is overly word or bulky is quite useless in our industry; the marketing material that you should use in commercial real estate should be pictorial and informational.  In the first meeting that you have with new clients and prospects ensure that you focus on well-crafted visual material first and foremost.
3. Location based relevance – most of the people that you meet with will only be interested in their location and their property type. On that basis you should have industry updates by property type to support their focus.  Sales records, leasing activity, rental rates, and methods of sale from the property market currently will give you plenty of things to talk about.

From these very simple points of focus, you can hold plenty of meetings with new people in your location.  Over time those meetings will lead to future opportunity and listing activity.  You can never really predict the source of the next listing to come to you; however you can create meetings and connect with a lot of people in a regular way to open up the doors of property and listing opportunity at the right time.