Advertising and Marketing Plans that Work Well in Commercial Real Estate Agency

There are two types of marketing plans in commercial real estate.  There is the one that applies to ‘open listings’, and then there is the one that applies to ‘exclusive listings’.  There is a radical difference between the two.

An ‘open listing’ is a process of luck, so get away from listing in this way whenever you can.  You have no control over your client, the property, or the parties to the deal.  I would go so far as to say that you cannot trust a client in an open listing situation; they are likely to be talking to other agents constantly and comparing your offers or inspection results.  If you want to dominate your market as an agent, get away from ‘open’ listings as soon as you can.

Only an exclusive listing process will give you the best solution for promoting and marketing a quality commercial, industrial or retail property.  The time and effort required in matching a property to its target market requires the commitment of the client to one agent for a reasonable period of time; usually 4 months.  The selected agent can then dedicate the right focus into finding the best people to talk to and setting the momentum to inspections and offers.

Here are some marketing tips to help you in establishing a quality promotional campaign with an exclusive listing:

1. From the full inspection of the property you will understand the best target market that you should be tapping into with the marketing.  Give the client a complete understanding of what that market is looking for and how you can work with that.
2. Determine the features of the property that can help you with the momentum in promotion.  Build a story and a pitch for all your advertising using the property features.  Select the 5 property features that are of the greatest interest to the target market.  Use those as dot points in all you advertising.  When you change from advert to advert in different publications, create different messages.  This is most important on the internet so the search engines give your advert broader appeal.
3. Use keywords for your advertising based on the internet search terms.  You can get this information from a ‘keyword’ search on the major search engines.
4. Build a headline and sub headline for the property using words that sell.  You can see good examples of that with magazines and other property adverts.  The history of the property may be relevant to the local area and on that basis can be used in the marketing to real effect.
5. Match your marketing recommendations to the target market so the client can really see that you understand how to solve their property problem.  Be very specific at a personal level to help the client see how you will take the property to the market.
6. Always give your client 3 alternatives of marketing so they have a set of promotional choices to consider.

Successful marketing campaigns in commercial real estate agency are built from specific focus and speciality.  The ‘generic’ promotional process in property today does not work.