How to Hire Experienced Salespeople in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

In commercial real estate brokerage, the hiring of new salespeople will be a critical issue to support the flow of new listings and commissions into the business.  In any 12 month period, you will lose some of your sales and your administrative staff for uncontrollable reasons.  This then says that you must have a pipeline of recruitment underway.

Hiring experienced salespeople will have distinct advantages for you in the brokerage.  To allow the targeted process to occur, make sure that you understand and have identified the key players in the market.  Your competitors will have brokers and agents in employ that can be targeted.

Here are some of the advantages to employing experienced agents or salespeople with an industry profile and track record:

1. The agents and brokers that are active in the market today will have an established personal profile that can easily transfer to another brokerage.  A top agent will usually have a database of contacts and prospects that will move with them.
2. They will have established significant trust with a number of key clients in the local area.  Referral and repeat business should be achieved from that connection.
3. They will have significant market knowledge, profile, and confidence when it counts.  They will have the correct strategies and solutions to use as part of the presentation and pitch for new business.  Most top agents should convert at least 65 per cent of the listings that they pitch for.
4. A good agent will bring with them the advantages of greater success from working with challenging listings and difficult clients.  They will know how to handle those clients and those listings that need to be repackaged, restructured, differently marketed, or personally branded.
5. The experienced salesperson that specializes in a property type will be very useful.  That is even more so the case when your brokerage doesn’t specialize in that property type currently.  The extra skills that are brought to the business will allow you to diversify and grow market share.
6. If you pick up a new broker for your commercial brokerage business, it is a wise move to allow them to work the territory and the property type that they have built their market share around.  This may cause some difficulty with other employees that you have now in the same territory or patch.

So the logic here says that you can and should target experienced brokers and agents.  Choose the right people based on professional character, results, and market share.  Integrate them into your existing team so that the skill base and the database will be improved.

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