Why You Should Get the Hard Things Done First Every Day
There are some things that commercial real estate agents hate to do. As a direct result many agents struggle with creating personal market share and achieving new listings. Take a look at the things that are a challenge to you or perhaps those that you just avoid.
Having worked with many agents for some years, I know that there are some common threads of ‘avoidance’ when it comes to real estate agent activity. They are usually a mixture of the following:
- Researching the streets within your territory for details of property owners
- Door knocking local businesses to see what they are doing in property now and what they may need in the future
- Cold calling property owners and business leaders to introduce property services
- Updating the database with new people and entering information from current meetings
Whilst these are not ‘mentally taxing’ to most agents, they take commitment from a time and a personal perspective. Most agents will prefer to do many other things before they devote time to these simple issues; ‘call reluctance’ is a big problem in our industry.
It is not hard to see that these things will produce new business opportunity if they are repeated every day in a systemised way. These strategies are usually the difference between the ‘top agents’ and everyone else.
The Year Ahead
As we move into another twelve months of commercial property market activity and opportunity, now is a good time to consider just how you can change your real estate activities to drive more clients and listings your way. Here are some rules that may help you:
- First thing when you arise every day, spend 20 minutes practicing your dialogues and your cold calling scripts. This simple activity is very empowering and helps you focus your key prospecting skills.
- Get to the office early so you can be well prepared to make cold calls from 0830 hrs every morning Monday to Friday. Spend about 2 or 3 hours on the telephone each day in this way.
- At 0830 start making your calls. In a period of one hour you should be making about 15 to 20 calls. Some of those calls will revert to a conversation whilst others will be a ‘call back’ or a ‘throw away’. The call conversation is simply to see if the person has a need or an interest in commercial, industrial, or retail property in your town or city.
- Create meetings with those people that can show interest in what you are talking about. Ideally you can and should meet with anyone that will require property help now or in the future. Your call conversation will tell you that.
- Track and measure everything you do in prospecting. Your numbers should be improving in all tracked categories as you move through the year. The most logical numbers to track are calls made, meetings created, listings created (open versus exclusive listings), listings sold or leased, and commissions written.
- Strengthen all your client and prospect relationships through ongoing contact. You should connect with all of those people at least once every 90 days. For those that are active now or soon you will be contacting them weekly.
It is a fact that our industry is highly ‘people and relationship oriented’; most high quality listings will be created through long term relationships that are established and encouraged. The clients that we serve invariably know and trust the agents that they select and work with.
As we move ahead into a new 12 months of commercial real estate activity, take a look at the things mentioned here and decide how you can strengthen those things or perhaps do more of them. To become a ‘top agent’ it requires a high level of focus at a personal level.
