The Ultimate Guide to Sales Canvassing in Commercial Real Estate: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

A sales canvassing plan in commercial real estate involves people, properties, and precincts. The canvassing plan in sales allows an agent to connect to all those property market elements.

Ultimately the target of the process is to win new business.

If you want more listings or market share growth as an agent, consider structuring your plan, including some of the elements below.

Agent Points of Difference

Always begin or shape your marketing approach as an agent based on known facts. They are the points of ‘clarity’ that help you stand out from the other agents in the location. Think about what those factors could be. They are the points of difference you bring to the market; they should be specific and not generic.

When you define those elements, your real estate conversations with others will get more relevant to you and the people you talk to. Your confidence in connections will show in your discussions and property presentations.

The points of difference that you use can be marketing channels, skills that are unique to you, your database complexity and size, and your strategies when it comes to sales.

The question to answer as you consider this would be, ‘Why would people see you as a better agent to solve their property problems?’

1. Don’t Be Generic as an Agent

People will likely ‘test’ you in conversations, meetings, and telephone canvassing. When they ask questions like, ‘Why should I meet with you?’ or ‘Why should I list my property with you?’, there must be an answer that is not generic. Ensure that your response to those questions is unique and client relevant.

What does ‘client relevant’ mean? It will usually be something that involves a benefit to the client. That could be levels of enquiry, local market coverage, a database that contains plenty of buyers looking for property, proven price outcomes, or better levels of investigation. It can also mean experience with the property type or a shorter time on the market.

Build your marketing story around your agent points of difference, and ensure they are attractive to the clients and prospects you connect with. You want the clients to listen to you. A few ‘success’ stories will help you get the bigger picture in the seller’s mind.

2. Agent Territory Rules

Think about your territory that can give you the listings you want. Where is that territory, and how many listings or properties are there? Also, consider the other agents busy in the location and how they could impact your property marketing.

If you compete with other agents, how will you do that, and why will you be ‘different’ in a real estate solution for your clients and prospects? Diligence and consistency are the first ‘tools of choice’ for growing your real estate business.

Clarity on your location helps you see what is happening, making establishing a personal marketing plan easier. There are different tools or strategies that you can use in your marketing plan, including the telephone, dropping in business cards, email marketing, and referral business.

3. Creating Canvssing Zones

An excellent way to approach your real estate territory is to set boundaries between the ‘primary’ zone and the ‘secondary’ zone. That is where you will get your listings from. The ‘boundaries’ will be main roads and precincts or suburbs. Define it on a map and start to research all the property owners in the region.

Most of your listings, or around 75%, should come from your primary zone, so deciding how to establish your marketing plan through the region is centred on the tools that you have available, the priority streets, buildings, and property owners.

You also set a secondary territory or zone to take other listings from the greater region. Perhaps that region is further away, or the area does not contain many properties you like to focus on.

So, your real estate business is centred on a location and the two zones within the set area.

4. Setting Client Types

Consider the clients available in the property market today and make some choices regarding the people your skills match. Selling a property is one thing, but specialising in sales helps you get closer to certain people, such as business owners, investors, or fund managers.

Each class of client type will have factors of service or property investment that you can build on. Your agent real estate services can be specific to your client base and preferred property types.

5. Call Contact Ratios

Make more daily calls to the classes of people you want to do business with. How many calls should you make every day? Your location and preferred property types can impact that question; however, making 25 to 50 outbound calls per day is a good average. Track your progress as you make your calls and create real estate conversations or meetings.

A reasonable degree of organisation is required at the agent level to achieve that number. When you make the calls, you will find the business; that advantage applies in any property location and across all economies.

When the property market changes, you make more calls; always go back to your database and your canvassing processes to get more results from your property market.

6. Client Value

Some client types will be more valuable to you than others for the location and the property types. Who are the ‘A’ class clients, and how do you find them? You can determine the ‘B’ and ‘C’ class clients when you have that answer.

You can set rules through your lists to help you understand who the VIP clients are. A focus on VIP clients is instrumental to the growth of brokerage for the longer term.