The focus of my article here will really be on answering the second of these two questions, as you’ll be hearing countless experts both on TV and in other media debating both sides of the answer to the first question for months to come. And at the end of this article I’m going to give you a resource that I believe is the best one I could ever give you for having you really understand the underlying cause of these current conditions in our economy right now, too.

So let’s look at the mechanics of what’s really going on here. We oftentimes hear that bailouts are going to be paid for with taxpayer money, but what does this really mean? And if these bailouts will be paid for with taxpayer money, and the government is already spending more money than it’s receiving in taxes, where will the additional money come from?

And before you begin to answer that question by saying something like, “We’ll be borrowing the money,” do you know exactly who we’ll be borrowing the money from, and the mechanics that will actually create the borrowing for us? This is oftentimes a very nebulous arena that’s never really been explained to us. And if you’ve never really studied how our banking system works, fasten your seatbelt and get ready to learn something that will really surprise you…

What our banking system will do to handle these bailouts is create money that’s never, ever existed before. Since the bankers have the ability to create and add money to these companies’ bank accounts, this is what they’ll be doing. The money will be electronically placed into both bank and financial accounts to the sum of hundreds of billions of dollars, and all of this money will then become part of our entire money supply that’s now in circulation. There will be certain administrative procedures, paperwork, and details that will be followed around the timing and transfer of the money, but for all intents and purposes, this is the way it’s going to happen.

And of course in exchange for all of this money, our government will be taking over all of the bad loans and investments from these companies, too.

So the ways that we as taxpayers will all lose out because of this is:

1) The dollars that we’re currently holding onto ourselves will all become worth less through inflation, because they’ll be diluted by the new money being added into the system. And over time as this new money begins circulating, people will have more money in their possession and will begin spending it, causing prices to rise as a result of this.

2) We as taxpayers will be charged interest on the hundreds of billions of dollars of new money that will be added into the money supply, because we’ll be deemed to have “borrowed” it from the banking system. And this interest will then be added to the annual deficit and become part of our national debt…along with the hundreds of billions of new dollars that will be created and utilized for the bailouts themselves.

So has all of this now become crystal clear to you?

And if your head is spinning a little wondering how something like this could happen, my head was definitely spinning when I first began studying all of this stuff years ago, too. We’re used to thinking that money is something more tangible that’s exchanged for goods and services, and the concept that it could be created out of thin air in such huge numbers electronically, can sometimes be very hard for us to swallow. But I’ve read quite a lot of books about the banking industry and about the history of money throughout the ages, and I’ve studied these subjects quite extensively. And I can tell you with absolute certainty, that this is how the system works.

But the truth of the matter is that explaining in every detail how the system works is not something that’s really possible for me to do here in the context of this one article. And with this in mind, there’s a lecture that I recommend you listen to, and I’ll make an audio recording of the lecture available to you for free right now. The lecture is titled “The Creature from Jekyll Island”, and it’s based on the book of the exact same name. While in some ways the title may sound like a mystery novel, Jekyll Island is the island where our banking system was created many years ago. The lecture was given by G. Edward Griffin, the author of the book, and there’s no one who can explain how our banking system works in more down-to-earth, easier to understand terms than Ed.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough to you the importance of listening to this lecture. When you listen to it you’ll come away from it with an entirely new understanding of our banking system, and an understanding that will be quite a profound one, too. And as these government bailouts continue to mount in the coming months, you’ll have a much better understanding of what’s really going on underneath them, which will help you to make better financial decisions.

The lecture itself is 70 minutes long, and I know this is a long time to sit next to your computer listening to a lecture. But just begin by listening to the first 35 minutes of it, and once you do I can almost guarantee you’ll want to listen to the second 35 minutes of it.

I’ve had people worth millions of dollars who have listened to this recording on my recommendation, and every one of them has told me it’s made a profound shift in both their knowledge and understanding of everything that’s financial. And if you feel after listening to this recording that you’ve learned a great deal from it, I recommend that you buy Ed Griffin’s book of the same title. Because I guarantee there’s a lot more you’ll learn in the book that there really wasn’t time for him to discuss within the time allotted for the lecture.

Click here to begin listening to the lecture.

“Real estate is easy. It’s the people who are difficult.”

And I found myself laughing in recognizing the truth in that statement that I had experienced many times myself throughout my own 20-year commercial real estate brokerage career. The problems in my own commercial real estate transactions usually revolved around the egos of the people I was dealing with, and how much they wanted to get their own way with the other principal. And when you add to this the fact that sometimes the other broker I was working through wanted everyone to know how important he was in the transaction, sometimes things got really interesting.

But when you’re in the heat of battle in your brokerage business, trying to get more things done than you seem to have time for, it’s helpful to have a target or blueprint to shoot for so you have a standard to measure your business by. With this in mind I’ve created an easy 5-point blueprint that I think is a good, simple target for you to follow. And if your production level isn’t where you want it to be right now, the chances are very high that you’re falling short in one or more of these 5 areas.

So here are the 5 areas of my blueprint system to help ensure your commercial real estate brokerage success:

1) Be prospecting 10-12 hours every week

There are very few income and production problems in commercial real estate brokerage that won’t be resolved by constantly prospecting 10-12 hours every week. Ask yourself the following question: “If I prospected 10-12 hours every week for the next 12 months with no excuses, how much income will I earn in my business?” And if you like your answer to that question just get your prospecting done with no excuses.

2) Send mailers to your clients and prospects twice or more every month

Mailing may be the most underutilized resource in commercial real estate brokerage. When you mail to your people 12-24 times a year or more, in addition to making your prospecting calls, you make it very difficult for them to think of working with anyone else. And if you’re ever not getting your prospecting done you’ll still be prospecting your people through what you’re sending to them in the mail every month.

The best marketer in our industry who I know of spends more than $100,000.00 a year in marketing himself, including sending mailers to his clients and prospects five to seven times every month. So remember…mailing works in a big way in commercial real estate brokerage!

3) Have a database that includes every prospect you want to do business with, their individual names, phone numbers, the properties they own or occupy, and their mailing addresses

You can’t prospect all the people you want to if they’re not in your database. And if your database has holes in it you’re missing out on prospecting a lot of people you could be closing transactions with. This costs you a lot of money that’s just waiting to be discovered by you in your territory.

4) Build great long-term relationships with your past clients, take them to lunch, socialize with them, and give them gifts 2-4 times a year

You want to continue building relationships with the people you’re closing transactions with so you get additional business from them in the future. Socializing with them and giving them gifts builds the bond that will lead to future transactions with them. And if you don’t do this you’ll be competing with all of the other brokers once again for your clients’ next transactions without having any inside advantage with the clients. Or even worse you’ll find out that your client closed a transaction with another broker and you never even knew that your client was looking to do another real estate transaction. Spending $100.00-$200.00 a year on gifts for every one of your clients, to position yourself to earn more than $10,000.00 in commissions with every one of them three years from now on their next transactions, is a great investment of your time, energy, and money.

5) Work on your presentation skills so you continually improve them and deliver the best presentations of any broker in your market

When you improve your presentation skills and close more transactions with them, you’re making more money without needing more prospects to make it happen. But when you combine improving your presentation skills along with doing 10-12 hours of prospecting every week, you’ll then experience explosive growth in your business. The big problem here is that most brokers find the presentation style that makes them feel the most comfortable, which has nothing to do with finding the presentation style that compels the greatest amount of people to work with them. I recommend that you role play your presentation with someone acting as the decision maker along with you, and videotape the presentation. And when you watch the videotape I can almost guarantee you’ll see things you’ll want to change in your presentation immediately, which will then have you close more business.

So take a look at these 5 areas of my blueprint and see how you measure-up right now in your own brokerage business. And when you find yourself approaching the ideal in all 5 of these areas, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be thrilled with your success and the amount of money you’ll be making in your brokerage business.

While most agents believe in the idea of prospecting and feel they should be doing it, most agents end up dropping out their prospecting, and prospect only until they have enough leads to keep them busy. But in the end this will usually lead to inconsistent levels of production, and hanging on to the more marginal leads that just happen to come the agent’s way.

This is why reinventing yourself and marketing your brokerage business is very important, and probably the best way that I can illustrate this is through a true story involving one of my own one-on-one coaching clients…

Scott came to me 3-4 years ago as a brand new agent in the business and made his goal very clear to me. Within just months he wanted to create the impression in his prospects’ minds that he had already been a commercial broker in their area for 8-10 years. And when I began discussing with Scott the power of direct response marketing to his clients and prospects, Scott immediately recognized the value in this because he had already done this successfully in other businesses he had owned. So we began a direct response marketing campaign, and within his first few years in the business Scott had developed the campaign into pure art form. Working from a database of the 600 property owners he wanted to do business with, Scott began contacting each one of them 125 times throughout the year utilizing phone calls, mailing, broadcast faxes, and E-mail. And in just his fourth year in the business Scott sold more apartment buildings than any other broker in the state of Texas.

So if you’re relying right now on prospecting alone, and you’re not always getting your prospecting done, you’re costing yourself a lot of money. Begin doing direct response marketing and mail to your clients and prospects two or more times every month. Between this and doing your prospecting, you’ll be branding yourself in the minds of the people you want to work with, and they’ll begin thinking of working with you more frequently then they’ll begin thinking of working with your competitors.

——————————————————-

Tonight I’ll Be Interviewing Top Commercial Broker
Lawson Martin on a Live Teleconference Call

Tonight I’ll be interviewing Lawson Martin of Travers/Oncor International, and Lawson is one of the top tenant rep brokers in the business. His clients include AIG SunAmerica, Time Warner, Credit Suisse First Boston, EMI Music Publishing, Kaiser Permanente, Texaco, Unocal, and Warner Bros.

Lawson and I will be talking about what you need to know to keep your clients loyal to you throughout your commercial real estate brokerage career, and at the end of my interview with Lawson you can ask us any questions you want to about successfully building your commercial real estate business and taking it to the next level. For more information on this live event, click here.

What seems to be happening is there are fewer sale transactions going on, but the same number of brokers are still chasing the existing ones. So in the aggregate there are less total commissions being paid, which means that you need to close a higher percentage of the business in your area now than you did just a few years ago to earn and get paid the same amount of income.

And with this in mind I can talk to you about marketing and positioning yourself as the best choice your clients and prospects could ever make in a broker, but very few brokers want to spend the time and money to do this. And this is sad because if they did they’d learn how to completely dominate their own territory for many years to come. So what’s left are the basics…what almost every broker feels they should be doing more of but really doesn’t want to…and that’s prospecting.

When transactions were coming much easier you could do less prospecting because so many people wanted to buy properties. But things have changed in many areas and you may be experiencing this exact change yourself in your own business right now. So if you want to be maximizing your income in this market now, you need to be prospecting a minimum of 10-12 hours every week. Yes I know you probably don’t want to do this amount of prospecting, but ask yourself “How much money would I make if I prospected 10-12 hours every week over the next 12 months?” And if you like your answer to this question, just get your prospecting done with no excuses.

An old friend of mine, Mike Monteleone, CCIM, told me he still does 10-12 hours of prospecting every week in his business. And he credits his prospecting as the main component of his averaging over $42 million a year in sales production throughout his 35-year real estate career. So if Mike can still get 10-12 hours of prospecting done every week, you can get it done, too. It all comes down to you being committed to doing what will maximize your income in your business, vs. you buying into your own excuses and feeling more comfortable in not doing your prospecting.

If you really knew how much money not doing your prospecting was costing you at all times, you’d just get it done with no excuses.

And when it comes to the subject of taking action, one of my friends forwarded me a video of a man who finally decided to do just this in his own life. I’ve been on the Internet for more than 13 years now, and I receive over 600 E-mails a day. But I don’t remember an E-mail that’s impacted me in quite the way that this one has. So I want you to see this video to show you what’s possible when you take the action you know you must in your life.

This four-minute video shows Paul, a cell phone salesman in Great Britain, appearing on a show that seems to be similar to American Idol. He doesn’t look like much, and you can see by the expressions on the judges’ faces that they don’t really expect much out of him. But when he opens his mouth and finally begins to sing, something very magical begins to happen…

To see this video, click here.