Useful Workflow for Sales Agents
In commercial real estate brokerage today, there are plenty of things that can shift your priorities every day. That is why you need a workflow or planner to keep on track.
The agents that use a workflow process always get better results than the ‘random’ agents of the real estate market.
What is the problem here? The abundance of pressures on your brokerage time and tasks will happen, particularly as you get more clients, listings, and meetings. Each day will get busier in several ways. You are the only person who can control your actions and focus through those pressures.
So, you cannot control all your working days, and that is a fact that should be accepted. Don’t challenge the issue, but work with it.
Transactions, meetings, and negotiations will constantly shift your bias and workload. Whilst you may start the day with some set approach, things will be happening by mid-morning on most days.
Putting in the Agent Effort
Unless you protect yourself from that potential brokerage ‘chaos’, your results and efforts as an agent will stall. However, as you achieve more control in your real estate working day, you achieve better outcomes with clients, listings, and opportunities. There are some questions to consider here, such as these:
A Progress Plan for Agents
- What are the critical issues of the day?
- What things would you like to do if you have the time?
- What problems will do nothing for you in business or for your clients?
The basic rule is to set a balanced approach to your brokerage time and transaction focus. You are the right person to control your time and your focus. Start your career focus with this strategy below.
Strive to achieve profound control on 50% of each working day. That leaves you with the other 50% for absorbing the pressures and changes that will always be there. Here below are some ideas to help you build a workflow plan in commercial real estate brokerage.
Contacting New People
Many of your current clients will move in and out of investment property ownership at different times. It can be weeks, months or years before a client will take another step forward with their real estate property holdings.
The only way you can compensate for that is to have a consistent and ongoing new client contact program. You fill it with the right people, and the relationships with the ‘targeted’ people you know can be a future source of listing or transaction activity.
Help your ‘targeted’ people remember you as an agent that can help them.
Create Meetings for the Right Reasons
Not all your real estate appointments are potentially helpful. Be careful on just what meetings you agree to and attend. You will have team and client meetings to balance into your workflow.
Through all of that, you will also have inspection requests, new listings to formulate, and transaction progress contacts to make. The basic rule here is to have meetings for only the proper discussions with selected people.
Researching New Properties
The prospecting and research process for new properties can be pretty overwhelming to new people entering the industry. That is because there is so much to do and work through.
The best way forward with this concept is to keep the number of properties in your research process achievable and straightforward. Depending on how many other clients and listings you may already have, it could even be as simple as researching one new property per day to add to your list. Simplicity always works in commercial real estate brokerage today.
Review and Update all Listings
Your exclusive listings are always a top priority. Only take on open listings if it is a ‘last resort’ to help you tap into some opportunity you have identified.
Open listings can waste your time, so avoid them. Those open listings are not controlled hence anyone can sell them. That is where you can waste your time. Time is money.
So, what is the right way to list? Exclusivity is paramount in all that you do. You control the real estate listing for a period of time.
From that point of exclusivity, you then tune your exclusive listings to get more progress and shorten the time on the market.
Review Listing Stock Locally
Some of the listings of your agent competitors will influence your listing stock, methods of sale, and enquiry. For that reason, you must monitor all those properties both locally and online. Know what is happening with other properties.
Position your listings more favourably than those of your competitors. Your choices will be in real estate marketing and methods of sale. You can always choose better marketing solutions, timelines, and methods of promotion.
Travel Your Territory
You can always create more opportunities in your real estate business by meeting local people. Those are the people in your territory. Get to know them and remain in regular contact.
What is the process for that territory control? That is where you can and should ‘door-knock’ local business owners and building occupants. From that process, the ongoing conversations will produce opportunities.
Build Relationships with Key People
The question to consider here is ‘Who are the key people in real estate locally?’ For example, many agents work with investors and business owners. Are they part of your real estate client target market? How can you connect with them?
The choices you make here will be built around your property zone, the specialities of properties you work with, and the skills you bring to real estate. It is always better to specialize in your real estate zones and with your targeted people.
Prioritize Your Listings
It is always valuable to break down your listings into working categories of ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. The ‘A’ and ‘B’ class listings will get more of your time.
From that decision point, you can decide why a property would or could move through the categories towards more real estate action and deeper marketing. A ‘C’ class property could become a ‘B’ class property, and so on. Every listing can be improved for conversion and marketing.
Most top agents will focus on ‘A’ and ‘B’ class listings; other decisions can be made on and around the ‘C’ class listings to achieve better activity, pricing, or marketing.
Progress and Control All Documents and Transactions
Don’t let your listings and transactions get out of control. It takes time to move a property to a settlement. Many things can happen in days or weeks to settlement.
As another special note, don’t let the ‘professional’ associates or service providers slow or divert the transaction flow for the client. Stay close to your clients and their service providers to get transaction progress. Then, always follow through and stay with the transaction to the very end.
Giving Feedback to Clients
Many clients claim to be ‘neglected’ in a property transaction. That ‘neglection’ can be in any marketing, inspection, or transaction activity.
Every stage of the property transaction is to be nurtured. Feedback to a client will allow you to keep everything under control. It will also allow you to shape any hurdles or problems to the sale or settlement.
Engage with your clients frequently and give recommendations and or alternatives so they feel supported as the listing progresses. A client who has ‘choices’ will always feel in control as you take them forward in a sale situation.
Reposition Your Listing Marketing
Some of the properties you promote will need a marketing ‘change’. That is to build more enquiry or match the property more closely to the target market.
Many agents don’t spend enough time to align a property listing to the targeted buyers. Generic real estate marketing today doesn’t work. Be prepared to reposition all your exclusive listings and reshape your adverts or tune them to get more enquiry.
Improve and Enhance Local Area Marketing
This strategy is part of spreading your efforts locally to get more enquiry and or listings for yourself. It requires you to talk to people and connect with them regularly.
Understand what you are doing regarding local area marketing and think about how you can improve that coverage periodically and consistently over time.
There are always more people to find, plus business owners and property investors to reach out to. That requires specific logistical analysis and consistent property owner research into the local area.
The suggestion is to improve your local area coverage deliberately. An excellent way to do that is to look across the whole year in a staged covering of streets, buildings, and business coverage.
Create Function in Your Days
So, all of these strategies can help you establish a solid and effective workflow process in commercial real estate today.
As a broker or an agent in your location, everything you do each day will support, enhance, or delay your progress in brokerage transactions and with future opportunities.
That is where the workflow process will bring about better results for you over time. Build the strategy into your real estate day and working week. Stick with the process.
