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A Recommendation to Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Managers

By Jim Gillespie | April 7, 2009

Commercial brokerage managers often feel they don’t have the time they’d like to manage and take care of everything they need to within their own offices. And as a result their agents can oftentimes get off track from producing outstanding results for weeks to months at a time. And because many managers are also producing managers, meaning they’re doing their own brokerage transactions in addition to following-up on their daily management responsibilities, they oftentimes don’t find the time to check in with their agents individually on a regular basis…and this can greatly contribute to their agents being off track for long periods of time.

With this in mind here’s a simple recommendation for managers to implement to help keep their agents on track, which will also help the managers to discover more quickly when one of their agents is off track:

Have your agents submit a prospecting sheet every Friday telling you how many hours they prospected during the week. Or as an alternative, you could have them tell you how many calls they made, or how many conversations they had with their prospects, depending on how you as a manager prefer to measure their prospecting results.

By just doing this one simple process at the end of every week you’ll then accomplish the following:

1) You’ll find out how much time each of your agents is spending on prospecting.

2) You’ll recognize when any of your agents are at risk to having gaps in their production in the months ahead because they’re not doing their prospecting right now, which will alert you to step in and get them back on track.

3) Your agents will probably feel like they need to step it up and get more prospecting done when they know they have to fill out their results on a sheet of paper at the end of every week, knowing that you’re going to be looking at them. In addition, the process of them writing their results down and looking at them every week can really get some agents moving, as they begin to recognize that every single week their prospecting results are falling way short of what they should be getting done.

Now one of the keys here is you’ll need to meet with your agents one-on-one when you see they’re constantly not getting their prospecting done. Otherwise, if they never have to be accountable to you no matter how bad their prospecting results are, this process, along with no accountability for it, will make the process completely meaningless to them.

And as far as your top-producing agents are concerned, this will be a good process for them to do every week also. As long as they’re producing great results there will be no need for you to intervene with them, and at the same time when they see their own prospecting results falling off, they’re usually the kind of people who will take the bull by the horns and begin doing more prospecting.

So if you’re a manager, begin having your agents turn in a sheet of paper to you every Friday stating how many hours they’ve prospected for the week.

And if you’re an agent, make sure that your manager doesn’t get to read this posting…:)


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