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Is Your Brokerage Production in Danger in 2009?

By Jim Gillespie | February 17, 2009

One of the biggest mistakes I see commercial brokers making whenever the New Year arrives is deluding themselves about the changes they’re now going to make in their businesses. When in effect what’s really going on is they feel more relaxed that the previous year is behind them now, and that December 31st is now a long way away from them again. This can create the great feelings of “this is going to be a much better year for me”, when in reality the broker doesn’t change much about his or her brokerage business, and they just end up staying busy doing most of the same things they were doing before.

So here are some questions for you:

1) Were you happy with the results you produced in your brokerage business on 2008?

2) What were you going to do differently in 2009 to produce better results in your brokerage business?

3) Are you doing what you said you’d do differently in 2009, or have you already gotten off track?

4) How much prospecting do you need to be doing every week in your brokerage business to achieve your income goal for 2009?

5) Have you been achieving your prospecting goal every week throughout 2009?

If you find that you’ve gotten off track in doing what you said you were going to do in 2009, this is an early wakeup call. Because if you’re off track you’re already running out of time. In order to make sure you close all your sales transactions by the end of the year, you need to have them already moving forward by the end of August or by the end of September…especially with all the difficulties around financing right now. Which means you still have just a little more than 6-7 months to identify your principals and begin moving forward with these transactions.

The length of time for closing lease transactions will depend, among other things, on the size of the typical requirement you work on, the type of property, and the length of time for negotiations and tenant improvements to be completed. But generally speaking the larger the requirement the longer it’s going to take to both consummate the lease transaction and get paid. Which means again in most situations that you need to be working with your principals and moving forward months before the end of the year ever gets here.

So while you may think that you have until December 31st to meet your income goal for the year, you really need to have your transactions already in progress several months before then.

So in answering the questions I’ve outlined above, if you’re already off track you need to both recognize this and get back on track right now. Because otherwise there’s no way you’re going to accomplish your income goal for the year. I’m waking you up right now so that you don’t have to face an even bigger wake up call around September. Get your butt moving, and if you think that working together with me one-on-one to keep you focused, on track, and hold you accountable towards achieving your goals would be a good idea, send me an E-mail or give me a call. These people did, and you can see the impact it’s already had on their brokerage businesses:

Click here to see what these commercial brokers have already accomplished in their brokerage businesses.


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