Ways of Finding New Clients to Serve in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
New clients are commercial real estate brokerage’s ‘bread and butter’. The quality of the clients that you connect with and the addition of others to your database will help you grow your market share in your town or city. The message is that you should be selective on finding and communicating with the best clients in your area.
If you work in a competitive real estate area, there will be plenty of agents chasing the same business, and for that reason, it pays to have a solidly based prospecting process to build your contacts and property listings. If you can find other listings before your competitors then you are achieving results.
Preferred Client Types
To find new clients and listings faster you should look into the property activities of the local area and find ways to tap into segments. Those segments are usually driven by:
- property developers
- investors
- owner occupiers
- tenants
- franchise groups
Contact Strategies
Here are some ways to tap into those segments:
- Spend at least 2 to 3 hours every day out of the office talking to business owners and tenants in your territory. Create conversations and learn what is happening locally; that information will be valuable market intelligence.
- It is a fact that the commercial property market is centred firmly around business growth and movement. Those 2 facts should be part of the questioning processes as you speak to a lot of property occupiers locally.
- Look at the changes in the area surrounding zoning and redevelopments. Visit the building approvals office monthly to see what new approvals are coming up and those that are in the pipeline for completion.
- When an agent competitor puts a sign on a property, use that sign as a catalyst to talk to surrounding business owners and property investors. It is quite likely that a nearby property or business owner will want to compete with the listed property.
- Many property owners purchase property to hold for the longer term. It is a known fact that pressures of property change or expansion occur after year 4. The same cycle applies to business owners in occupation. To use this cycle of property ownership successfully it is a matter of getting the history of property ownership and lease expiry dates.
Simple sources of market intelligence such as these will help you find the new clients in your area. From that point onwards you build your contact system and database.