When you start your career in commercial real estate brokerage, don’t take too long to understand the value of client contact and prospecting. If you want to jump-start your career and grow your market share quickly, you will need to know the local people comprehensively and thoroughly. That process should start immediately. Master the process and get it underway.
Practice will help you through the issues and struggles. Practice every day. Good brokers do exactly that.
So what can you chase and work on?
Many of the property investors and the business owners that we consider as clients need help throughout the year as the property market changes. That help could be in commercial sales, leasing, purchasing, or property performance. The strength of your knowledge and skills across those issues will help you connect with those clients with relevance at the right time and offer the best levels of service. Know how to talk across those matters in a real and significant way.
Here are some specific ideas to help you kick-start your career and fast track the results that you are seeking:
- Get out of the office every day – when you get out into your territory or designated property precincts, you will see issues of change and opportunity. Spend at least half a day out of the office talking to people in your territory. Conversations are critical to finding the leads and opportunities that exist. Become very familiar with your territory and precinct at a property and personal level.
- Street by street coverage – get some maps of the area so that you can track your activities on a Street by Street basis. As you move through the streets, identify the buildings and the businesses. Put that information into your database for later resolve and research.
- Business by business coverage – in considering your local area, there will be plenty of businesses that you can talk to over time, and on that basis organization at a personal level will be required. Talk to the business leaders in each case through a simple cold calling and door knocking process. Those business leaders will know more about the location than you do. They can also introduce you to the leads and the opportunities that they know are about to happen.
- Leasing segments – tenants and landlord services will shift and change throughout the year as the supply and demand factors similarly change in the location. Business sentiment will be the primary catalyst to tenancy relocations and occupancy retention. Keep talking to the tenants, and you will then help your landlords retain or find the best tenants for the occupancy requirement.
- Sales momentum – seller and buyer services are a special part of the industry. There will always be good investors looking for new investment stock. Devote some of your prospecting efforts into investment stock. Find the investors looking to change portfolio and property focus.
- Simple conversations – as you go about your business day in your territory or precinct, create conversations with the ‘locals’. Make friends and strike new business acquaintances. Our business is not that complicated, but it is largely based on personal contact. Get to know more new people every day.
- Marketing online – it is interesting to note that most agents and brokers are very ordinary in their personal online efforts. You can turn that weakness in your competitors into a massive online momentum for you and your business. Understand the best ways to use social media with due regard for market updates and useful local area information. The search engines are attracted to information that has been carefully prepared for the local area with due regard for keywords. Your business profile online should be driven into keywords and market segments. That will help your online profile. Don’t confuse your online messages with too many keywords.
(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)
Commercial Real Estate Online 