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4 Important Activities to Explode Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business

By Jim Gillespie | December 2, 2010

Most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule. The rule that says that 80% of the business closed in sales organizations is normally closed by just 20% of the salespeople. And there’s probably a lot of truth in applying this rule to the commercial real estate brokerage offices throughout our industry, too.

In addition to the 80/20 rule, I believe more than 80% of the growth of your brokerage business will come from focusing on the following four areas:

1) Prospecting
2) Mailing
3) Improving Your Presentation Skills
4) Building Relationships

Prospecting

Prospecting is both the easiest and fastest way to build your real estate business. The main problem here is that most commercial agents, both new agents and veterans, keep making excuses about why they can’t get their prospecting done. If you just prospected 10-12 hours every week of the year you’d be immersed in so much solid activity, that you’d stop making those kind of excuses altogether. You’d just be making more money for yourself, plain and simple. The key, though, is continuing on with your prospecting when you get busy with solid new activity, because this is when most brokers stop doing their prospecting.

When you prospect every week year-round you make more money, you upgrade the quality of client you’re working with, and you upgrade the average commission you earn per transaction. This is because you’re constantly focused on finding new and better leads, and you let go of the more marginal leads you used to be working on.

Mailing

Mailing is definitely the most underutilized tool in commercial real estate brokerage. And when you mail to your clients and prospects two or more times every month, you brand yourself in their minds as the agent they’ll want to work with. The problem, though, is that most commercial brokers won’t spend any money on a regular mailing campaign.

A solid mailing program will make you a lot more money in new commissions when compared with what you’re spending on the mailing program. This definitely applies if you’re mailing to your clients and prospects two or more times every month, as your clients and prospects will constantly have you on their minds when you’re mailing to them with this kind of frequency.

One very successful broker who I’ve interviewed, who’s a member of both SIOR and CCIM, told me that his brokerage income quadrupled when he began his solid mailing campaign to his clients and prospects, and he now spends more than $100,000.00 a year on marketing. This is how much of a difference mailing can make to you in your brokerage business, if you’re willing to seize the opportunity.

In addition, solid, targeted E-mailing can be a great way to develop new business for yourself also, but you need to be utilizing the right system to make it all happen for you. With this in mind I recommend the people at http://www.mindmatrix.net, as they have this solid system already in place, and they have a number of additional products and services that you may find very useful as a commercial broker, too.

Improving Your Presentation Skills

Improving one’s presentation skills is one of the most overlooked areas in commercial real estate brokerage. If you normally close 40% of your prospects on working with you exclusively, and you improve this percentage to 50% through improving your presentation skills, you’ve just increased your income by 25%. (The 10% improvement divided by the original 40% closing ratio represents a 25% improvement…and 25% more money in your pocket.)

Find someone to deliver your "exclusive" presentation to and videotape it. Then after watching the video you’ll recognize that you’ve learned a great deal from it. Notice the areas you’d like to improve on, implement your improvements, and videotape yourself again in three months. When you continue doing this on a regular basis you’ll find your clients and prospects saying "Yes" to you more frequently, which translates into more money for you.

Building Relationships

So many commercial agents neglect the clients they’ve already closed transactions with. And this often continues for weeks, months, and even years after closing a transaction with them. In the mean time your competitors keep calling these people and positioning themselves to work with them the next time they have a real estate requirement.

If after 10-20 years in the business you’ve closed transactions with 200 different people (or companies), and on the average these people continue closing one transaction every five years, that’s 40 transactions you could be involved in closing every year just off of the repeat business from these people. But this only applies if you build relationships with them and position yourself as their "broker for life" throughout the years along the way.

Stay in contact with these people, ask them how you can help them even when you don’t think they’re looking to close a real estate transaction right now, take them to lunch constantly, and give them gifts 2-4 times a year. And in doing this it makes it very hard for your clients to ever think about working with anyone else.

All the success you’ve ever wanted to achieve as a commercial real estate broker is constantly available to you. And if you just focus on these four arenas and do what I’ve recommended, you’ll experience solid growth in your commercial brokerage business in the months and years ahead.  

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If you want to plan next year so you achieve solid success in your commercial brokerage business, join me for my upcoming teleconference titled, "Planning Your Commercial Real Estate Excellence for 2011." I’ll be interviewing a top commercial broker who’s closed more than $2.5 billion in commercial real estate transactions, and I’ll send the audio CDs, written transcription, and highlights of the teleconference all in the mail to you. Click here for more information on this teleconference, and to learn how you can obtain all of this information.

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If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial real estate brokerage business to the next level, click here to contact me.

"After just weeks of working with Jim I’m getting much more done now with far greater ease, and he has my agents completely on fire and much more passionate about their business!"

Mike Spears, SIOR
The National Realty Group

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.


Topics: Marketing, Persuasion, Prospecting | No Comments »