How to Amount to Something in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage in this Market

Motivation is something that can be considered as an essential ingredient to the success of any commercial real estate agent or broker.  Every day there needs to be a degree of personal motivation in each agent to do the difficult tasks and confront regular challenges in the industry.

Every day there will be issues with clients, listings, negotiations, and marketing activities.  Given that you may have plenty of listings on your books, you can easily get distracted and diverted from the things that really matter.

In saying that, it is preferable that every agent and broker focuses on exclusive listings rather than open listings.  In the open listing situation you cannot control the stock and you have very little control over the client.  You will never really know exactly what is going on with the property at any given point in time.  An open listing is only useful if you want to quote the property to people within your database.

The clients that prefer or demand the open listing process can waste a lot of your time.  Most top agents in the market today will refuse to take on open listing knowing that the real results that they create will come from exclusivity.  On that basis they improve their sales pitch and presentation around the logic and the processes of exclusive listings.  It would be wise for you to consider the same strategy.

Motivation

So let’s go back to the topic of motivation and the role that it has to play in the performance of a real estate agent or broker.  If you have a system to work to each day, it is quite easy to stay ‘on track’ when it comes to the essential real estate tasks such as prospecting, marketing, and negotiating.  In that way it is easy to recognize when a time wasting issue arises.

You can create a ‘victory log’ to help you see where results are being achieved and momentum is occurring.  In that way you can see how some more activity directed towards the right things will help you get further results.  Here are some factors to merge into your ‘victory log’ on a daily basis:

1. Cold calling activities – Track the number of cold calls that you make every day to new people in your local area.  As part of that process you can track the number of calls that convert to meetings.  Make it a target to convert two new meetings every day from your calling activity.
2. Meetings per day or per week – The commercial real estate industry centers very much on the personal approach and the number of people that you know.  On that basis the number of meetings that you create per day and per week will help you get traction and dominate the local property market.  As mentioned in the previous point, an achievable goal would be two new meetings per day with new people.
3. The listings per week – The number of listings that you create each week will be important to growth of market share.  Some of those listings will be converted to a successful transaction.  Conversion rates are always higher when it comes to exclusive listings (as well as a shorter time on market), and on that basis ensure that your focus is always on exclusivity.  Open listings can waste a lot of your time given that you have no control the stock or the client.  So in tracking the number of listings that you create, give priority to exclusivity; it is questionable whether it is even worthwhile in tracking the numbers of open listings for the reasons mentioned.
4. Successful transactions and commissions – Some deals take a long time to put together.  A continual focus on active transactions and the status of negotiations will help you lift your conversion rate and ratio of results.  So the message here is that you should monitor your transactions, your clients, your commissions, and your negotiations.  Practice and role playing will always help you develop your professional skills around the things that really matter and the high quality properties that you list.  Track the number of successful transactions that you close on a weekly and monthly basis.  Also track those numbers quarterly and relate them back to your business plan and business goals for the year.
5. Growth of database – The database that you use should be updated each day so that all the current conversations, meetings, and listing quotations are accurately tracked.  Make sure that you fully understand the capabilities of the database software you are using, and how it is integrated into your marketing processes, social media, and listing activity.  Ideally, your database should be growing on a weekly basis and that should be as a direct result of a prospecting and cold calling plan.

Taking all of these things into account, you can see the benefit of creating a victory log as part of the goals and targets process.  In commercial real estate brokerage your motivation and your momentum will grow when you track the right numbers efficiently and directly.  Look for the incremental improvements in all of the five categories mentioned, so that you can see what is working for you when it comes to growing your property business.