When you work as a broker or agent in a commercial real estate business, a good imagination will help you see the available property opportunities that are around you in the city or town. Acting on those opportunities locally will be the next important stage of moving forward. Commissions and clients await your identification and action.
Stay focused and organized as you look for property opportunities. Use your imagination with a professional focus. Filter your ideas into property types, people, precincts, and levels of reality.
Track everything that you do and see, and do that in an excellent quality database program. It is easier to act on things when you see the ‘steps and stages’. Break down the complexity of things into levels that you can act on.
Creative Brokerage Vision
So, the factors of imagination that you want to nurture here are creative and visionary. Seeing the potential transaction, listing, or property development early is important. You are the broker or agent with the ‘property market awareness’; that information is of value to the clients that you work for.
With a fuller awareness of the property market, it is likely that you will see many things before others do, and particularly the clients that need help or want to expand or change their investments. Acting early on opportunities before other agents and competitors will help in converting the new business.
Capture the Ideas
How can you work with this valuable approach to your real estate business? Here are three useful ideas:
- Carry a small notebook with you that you can use at any time to capture your thoughts and observations. That is particularly so with any things that you see or think about during the working day or after hours; capture your ideas. The act of writing things down will be very helpful in capturing the concepts, ideas, and facts that you come across every day. Most successful property transactions start from a small idea or observation that is acted on at a later time.
- Mind-maps are a way of creating a vision or opening a complex real estate issue into a ‘roadmap’ of actions. One big issue or property event is usually a matrix of smaller steps or stages. There are plenty of mind-map programs that you can get to use on the computer or iPad. You can also use a simple blank piece of paper as a ‘mind-map template’ when you are working with complex issues. Get a simple blank piece of paper and a set of colored pencils, and then use those basic tools to extract your ideas. When you put something on paper you can act on the opportunity and the separate stages; you can see the ‘road ahead’.
- Devote the start of the day to ‘brainstorming’ your business and your property market. The best time to do that is when you arise first thing in the morning. You can ‘brainstorm’ your thoughts over a coffee and breakfast, or perhaps before your regular exercise routine.
The message here is that you can productively use your observations from the marketplace to find opportunities in commercial real estate brokerage. You just need a few tools to help you be creative and visionary.
