Success Planning a Commercial Real Estate Career

In commercial real estate agency today you really do need to set come clear goals and plans to keep you on track with the things that you want in listings, market share, and commissions.  An agent without this focus will struggle with momentum.

So you need a ‘success plan’ to take you forward.  What does a plan of this type look like and when do you create one?  It is created once a year and it is monitored monthly. 

As part of this process you can then see what is working, changing, and lacking.  Adjusting your plan is important to keep you heading to the targets that you need.

Key Performance Indicators

Commercial real estate agency is a personal thing.  It is something that is driven from the actions and skills of a salesperson.  It doesn’t really matter who you work for, but it does matter what you do as an individual in your job.  Every day the key and important things should be done.

Now I know that many agencies will impose on the salesperson a series of key performance indicators for the year.  Each week and each month those KPI’s will be tracked by the agency leader or principal.  Unfortunately the KPI’s set by the agency are for the convenience of the agency only, and most individual agents will not take ownership or commit to the numbers.

So how do you get around this problem?  You work in reverse. You ask the agent or salesperson to set the Key Performance numbers that are real and relevant to where they think that can and should go in performance for the year ahead.  I call it ‘Success Planning’.

The individual agent sets the numbers as part of the ‘plan’ and gives them to the team leader.  Those numbers can then be merged into the bigger picture.  Perhaps they will need shaping, but the numbers are ‘owned’ by the salesperson.

What numbers should you have in one of these plans?  Here are some things to help you.

1. Size of database
2. Client list growth
3. Exclusive listings
4. Time on market
5. Referral business
6. Commissions written
7. Sales in $ terms per quarter
8. Leasing in $ terms per quarter
9. Property management leads for the quarter
10. Calls outbound per week
11. Meetings per week
12. Presentations per week

When a salesperson commits to a list of key performance indicators like this, they can see what they have to do and how it occurs. The fact of taking action is much easier because the salesperson can see what has to be done.  In this commercial real estate market, that is a good thing.