To be successful in commercial real estate brokerage you have to know how to negotiate through the challenges that you strike in prospecting, marketing, pitching, presenting, inspecting, and closing on your specialty property types.
It stands to reason that your negotiation skills are really important in what you do every day. You have to ‘think on your feet’ as you hear about the other person’s concerns and perceptions in selling, leasing, or managing property.
Special Challenges
Some clients and prospects will present you with unique challenges as you move a property campaign or issue forward. What you can do here to lift your conversions is prepare and practice your responses with the most common challenges.
Each week the entire sales or brokerage team can practice their responses to the common problems and issues that they find and strike each week. They can share the issues that they find as part of client interaction and prospecting activity. The team can learn from each other. Through practice and sharing within the team, negotiation skills can improve.
Negotiation Skill Development
Here are some ideas to help you lift your negotiation skills as a team or as an individual:
- LOCAL PRESSURES: Be prepared to adjust your skills based on the pressures and the facts from today’s property market. Understand what’s happening with enquiry, current supply, and future occupancy predictions. Look at the property and the local property market from the perspective of a tenant, an investor, and a landlord. Assess the challenges in each case. You can then do a swot analysis based on the challenges that you see today. Share those challenges and your responses within the team.
- HOT TOPICS: There will be certain hot issues that are always rising to the top of a typical property negotiation. Those hot issues will be a negotiation practice priority when you are considering your skill development personally and within the team. Issues can be specially considered such as the over pricing of a property, the failure to accept market conditions, or unrealistic expectations of the client or prospect from a negotiation. When you look within the disciplines of commercial sales, leasing, and property management, there are always common issues that you strike in a regular and ongoing way.
- FEE SOLUTIONS: The fees that you learn and the commissions that you charge are also important factors of negotiation priority. Be prepared to pitch and sell your services in a comprehensive way and at a reasonable fee; that will involve negotiation practice and improvement. Can you support and argue the value that you bring to a client from a fee perspective? Ultimately the client just wants a good result in a timely way and they don’t want to pay too much for it. Your fee argument and commitment should be built around an expectation of results. As we all know, the cheaper services offered by less professional agents in the industry are ultimately counterproductive and time wasting for the client.
The message here is that you can do a lot for yourself and within the team when you practice your negotiation skills in a regular and ongoing way. Take into account the existing factors of the property market and the pressures that you experience with your clients and prospects. Practice your professional negotiation skills based on the challenges of the commercial property industry today.
You can get more negotiation tips for Commercial Real Estate Brokerage in our ‘Snapshot’ eCourse right here.
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