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Why Giving Gifts to Your Commercial Real Estate Clients is Extremely Important

By Jim Gillespie | September 10, 2007

Giving gifts to clients in our industry is not something that’s normally done on a regular basis. At the very most sometimes a gift is given immediately after a transaction closes, but that’s usually about it for most commercial real estate brokers. But if you’re not giving gifts to your clients on a continual basis, you’re missing a huge opportunity to generate some solid repeat business for yourself.

Commercial real estate brokerage is transactional in nature, and this can make it more difficult to create the feeling within our clients that we have an ongoing relationship with them between transactions. Attorneys and accountants on the other hand often have ongoing interactions with their clients throughout the year, so the client then feels that they have a continual, ongoing relationship with these people.

But in commercial real estate your clients may do just one transaction every three to seven years, and when they’re not looking to do another transaction, it’s easy for them to feel that there’s no ongoing relationship between the two of you, and that you’re not their broker anymore. And this can lead to you feeling you must compete with all the other brokers again every time your clients have a real estate need, if you haven’t done a great job of maintaining your relationships with them between transactions.

This is why gift giving can be an important component of you maintaining great relationships with your clients and having them feel that you’re the broker who will represent them again on their next transaction. What we’re talking about here is the law of reciprocity, where when someone does something kind for another person, the person who received the act of kindness feels a desire within them to reciprocate in some way. And in the context of the relationship with your clients, the best way for them to reciprocate is to have you represent them on their next transaction.

If your average commission on a transaction is $20,000.00, and you give every one of your clients $200.00 in gifts throughout every year, it’s very easy to see how well this will work for you. If your clients do one transaction every five years, that’s an investment of $1,000.00 towards ensuring you’ll earn and receive an additional $20,000.00 commission. And that’s a very good return on your investment.

With this in mind I’ve had coaching clients tell me that the moment they walked into a client’s office and gave them a gift, the client then asked them to sit down and discuss representing them on their next transaction to buy, sell, or lease commercial real estate. This is the law of reciprocity in action.

The key here is for you to recognize the tremendous value of giving gifts to your clients 2-4 times every year on an ongoing basis, because most commercial brokers won’t take the time and spend the money to make this happen. But I must tell you, if you do this on an ongoing basis with all of the people you’ve closed transactions with, you’ll make it very difficult for them to work with another broker.

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If you’ve never been a member of my Commercial Real Estate Inner Circle before, you can join me for FREE on my next Inner Circle teleconference call this Wednesday, September 12th, when I’ll tell you how to become a Power Broker and take your commercial real estate brokerage business to an entirely new level. And if you’re already a Power Broker you’ll want to listen in on this call also because I’ll be interviewing Scott Caswell, one of the most successful Power Brokers in America. Scott is continually one of the top producing brokers in Los Angeles, and he’s been named his company’s Broker of the Year for 14 of the past 18 years. During this teleconference we’ll discuss what you need to know to move beyond what you’ve already accomplished in your commercial real estate brokerage business and begin making more money right now. And if you’ve ever felt that you needed to delegate more activities to other people instead of letting those activities bog you down and sap your productivity, we’ll tell you exactly how to get this done also.

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