Every Little Bit Helps in Commercial Real Estate Marketing

In commercial real estate sales or leasing, every little bit helps when it comes to marketing the property to the target market and local area.  A correctly constructed marketing campaign should be 75% focused on the local area and 25% focused on the greater region and beyond.  Here are some tips on marketing from our Newsletter for agents.

In just about all property marketing efforts, we find that most enquiries will come from local business owners and local property investors.  This is the reason for the bias to local marketing.  Sure you may have some properties that are an exception to the rule but almost always it is the local enquiry that really matters

So all of this being said, the advertising effort for any property and listing should be comprehensive and across a number of marketing tools and systems.  The days of ‘generic’ advertising and promotion are well gone.

So let’s differentiate marketing between ‘open listings’ and ‘exclusive listings’.

• In the ‘open listing’ situation you have no control on the property or the client.  For this reason advertising is largely a matter of convenience.  You put a sign on the property and an advert on the internet.  Any enquiries that you get you can process in an ordinary way.  Importantly you should not waste much of your time on any ‘open listing’.    If the client will not trust you with an ‘exclusive’ agency, then understand that your focus should be elsewhere on your better listings.
• ‘Exclusive listings’ are better for the client and for you.  If the client is genuine in the sale or lease process, ‘exclusive’ listings allow you to get deeply into promoting the property to the local area.  The communication between you and the client is a lot stronger and more relevant to getting results from the marketing campaign.  Every ‘exclusive’ listing should include a reasonable amount of vendor paid marketing funds.

When you are to promote a property to the local area, a campaign should be structured on the target market, and personally driven by you as the agent or salesperson.  When you get too many listings, the ‘personal’ side of property promotion gets a lot more difficult.  The number of ‘exclusive’ listings that you can take on at any one time is about 15 listings.  Beyond that number, you need a personal assistant to help you with the required systems and processes.  Remember that the client wants to talk with you and not your assistant.

To put high value and relevance into your property promotion, take every listing personally into the area and the business community.  Use every listing as a reason to talk to business owners and property investors.  In this way you will get better results from all your marketing campaigns.

You can get more free tips like this in our Newsletter for Commercial Real Estate Agents.