Timeless Business Planning Tips for Commercial Real Estate Brokers
If you work in commercial real estate brokerage, you need a business plan at a personal level to take you forward. That plan can take your focus and goals and turn them into action items. Ultimately a good plan and action process can give you a good market share and boost your listings and commissions.
Every agent and broker wants to be successful in the industry; it is just that momentum and focus are challenging issues for many. Real effort is required if you are to find the clients that you need and create the transactions required. That is where the business plan comes in.
I am not a big believer in a huge plan for the sake of satisfying some banker or financier. Your business plan has to be practical and useful to you in commercial real estate; it is something that has to move you to action. It is a process that you believe in and can use on a weekly basis to move ahead with your market share.
Your goals in doing all of this should include:
- Creating a good client list
- Building market share
- Creating exclusive listings
- Converting exclusive listings to successful transactions
- Attracting referral business
- Encouraging clients to do more business with you
- Growing your commissions by volume and per transaction
- Building your brand as a top agent within a zone and property type
So given all of these things you have some work to do. That is where the plan kicks in.
Here are some tips to help you create your plan:
- Understand the location and territory that you work within. Determine it geographically so you can track your results within the zone.
- Pick a property type and sale or lease discipline that is to be your ‘speciality’. It may be that you will be doing both sales and leasing within the same property type and that is just fine. In many respects a lease transaction will lead to a sales opportunity in the future.
- Get some facts and information together to help you understand the sales and lease activity in your area over a period of the last two years. Determine if those figures are improving and if the supply and demand of property in the area is to improve. Your commission base will be driven from the growth of sales and leasing locally. Predict those numbers from factual information.
- You will need to do a demographic review of the area and of your property type or client base to ensure that you have enough clients to serve into the future. Make certain that your market is growing.
- Check out the competing agents and brokers working on your selected property type now. Who are the ‘top agents’ and why is that so? Can you attract or build some market share around that?
When you have this information you can start to build your business plan as a commercial real estate broker. Don’t make it overly complex but base it on facts. Then you can set to task with your plan of action.
