See All of My Most Recent Commercial Real Estate Training Articles and Video Blogposts at CommercialRealEstateCoach.com
By Jim Gillespie | January 30, 2015
This Blog you’re reading contains hundreds of commercial real estate training articles that I’d written up through the year 2014. For all of my most recent commercial real estate training articles and video Blogposts, please click on the following link to visit my newest Web site at:
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Is It Time To Start Asking Your Owners for 10% Commercial Real Estate Commissions?
By Jim Gillespie | July 30, 2014
There’s a very successful SIOR member who I’ve coached, and he told me something interesting that he does whenever he’s having a listing agreement signed. He includes 10% as the commission he’s asking for within the agreement.
What this does, he says, is it oftentimes raises the bar in terms of the minimum amount of commission the owner will agree to.
"Sometimes the owner will agree to the 10% commission I’ve asked for," he says, "And sometimes we’ll negotiate down to 8%. But now, at the absolute minimum, the owner will be agreeing to a 6% commission."
Compare this now with starting out asking for a 6% commission, and having it become the beginning point for the owner to want to begin negotiating down from. When you’re starting out at 10%, the final amount agreed to is probably going to be higher.
When I asked the broker how his owners react whenever they see this 10% amount that he’s included within the paperwork, the broker responded to me with, "Sometimes they’ll look up at me and say, ‘Isn’t 10% a bit high?’ And then I’ll respond back to them with, ‘Well I’d really like to be charging you 18%, but 10% is just going to have to do.’"
Then both the owner and the broker begin laughing at this, breaking the tension.
Even though asking for 10% may sound like it’s on the high side to you, recognize that you’re definitely in the negotiation business. All day long you’re dealing with people who are negotiating directly through you, trying to get the other side to give more to them. With this in mind, whenever you’re negotiating for your own commission, the percentage that you start out with will help determine the percentage that you’ll end up with, especially when you’re dealing with owners who negotiate everything.
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We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"My work with Jim has helped me to fine tune and systematize my marketing program, and produce more leads for my business with far greater ease."
Ian Bertolina
Bertolina Commercial Real Estate Services
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Topics: Persuasion, Uncategorized |
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Powerfully Closing Your Commercial Real Estate Clients and Prospects
By Jim Gillespie | July 9, 2014
Closing in commercial real estate brokerage isn’t something that happens just because of some magical or forceful words that you say to someone. Closing is a direct result of doing many things correctly with your clients and prospects, from the very beginning of building your relationship with them, so that in the end they want to take the action you’re recommending to them.
At the same time, there are some things you can say or do to get your prospects to move forward and take action when they’re sitting on the fence, or when they’re not 100% certain that they’re ready to move forward with you. This is why, when you want to move people forward in these situations, it can be helpful to utilize the "Yes Set" in your sales presentations. The Yes Set is a way to structure your language to maximize the probability that your prospect will say "yes" to the final money question you’ll be asking them. With the Yes Set, you build a series of sequential "yes" answers from your prospect so that when you ask them the final question to get them to move forward, they’re more likely to answer "yes" to that question because of the momentum you’ve already created within them.
As an example of this, let’s say you’ve done a good job of building rapport with your prospect and you’re making a listing presentation to them. At the end of your presentation, as you’re building momentum towards asking them to sign the listing agreement, you could say something similar to the following to them:
"Mr. Stevenson, what we’re trying to accomplish here together is finding the best way to market your property so that you get the maximum price for it…correct?" ("Yes.")
"And you’ve decided that you want to sell your property right now for the maximum price you can get for it…correct?" ("Yes.")
"I’ve just shown you my 15-point marketing program, the program I’ve utilized to successfully sell properties in our area for many years now, and I’ve told you how I’ll utilize this program to successfully sell your property right now also…yes?" ("Yes")
"And we both agree that putting your property on the market right now, and doing everything that will get you the best price imaginable for it, is what you want to do…correct?" ("Yes.")
"So in putting all of this together, we’re now saying that you’re ready for me to move forward and market your property for you right now, uncover every stone imaginable to find you the absolute best buyer for your property, and deliver a price to you that you’ll be absolutely thrilled with…yes?"
When you’re building momentum like this, with your prospect giving you a number of "yes" answers before you finally ask them the money question, you increase the probability that they’ll answer "yes" to the money question also. This assumes, of course, that they like you, that they liked your listing presentation, and that you’re someone they’d consider listing their property with.
There are times in my one-on-one coaching sessions with my clients where I have them give me every single objection they’ve had to deal with in their brokerage business, and I tell them the language to utilize in these situations to then overcome these objections. In addition, we record these telephone conversations so the brokers can listen to them again and again, and learn how to deliver these responses to these objections completely on autopilot.
How you structure and utilize language in commercial real estate brokerage is an extremely important component to your success. The better that you become at doing this, the more money you’re definitely going to make in your brokerage business.
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We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"My work with Jim keeps me focused on being productive and doing the activities that will maximize my success."
Terry Adams
TOLD Partners
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Topics: Persuasion, Uncategorized |
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Commercial Real Estate Prospecting: Here’s One Idea to Just Let That Rejection Bounce Right off of You
By Jim Gillespie | June 18, 2014
One of the biggest factors that keeps brokers from prospecting is dealing with the rejection. I mean, who normally wants to pick up the phone and dial people for several hours, knowing that you’re going to be talking to people who really don’t want to talk to you?
So the better you become at handling the rejection, and understanding that it’s all just part of you making an amount of money that you’ll be absolutely thrilled with, the more successful you’re going to be in your brokerage business.
One of the most interesting ways I’ve ever heard of dealing with this rejection came to me from a top Cushman & Wakefield broker who I interviewed several years ago. He told me that what he does is he pretends that he’s stepping into being a "prospecting character" whenever he’s doing his prospecting…much like an actor would do whenever they’re playing a role. So by imagining that he’s stepping into his prospecting character, it’s no longer him that’s being rejected by these people. These people on the other end of the phone are rejecting his prospecting character instead of him, and they’re not rejecting him personally.
So this makes it much easier for him to handle any rejection that comes his way whenever he‘s calling other people on the telephone.
Once his prospecting session is then over, he steps out of being this prospecting character, and steps back into becoming himself once again.
This is one of the most creative and innovative approaches I’ve ever heard of someone doing whenever they’re prospecting. Just as an actor acting in a movie wouldn’t take it personally whenever another actor is yelling at them as part of the role that they’re playing, this broker is now doing the exact same thing whenever he’s prospecting.
With this in mind, since moving beyond rejection is a very important component within commercial real estate prospecting, I wanted to tell you about this idea because if you like it and it begins working for you, you’ll be doing more prospecting, and you’ll end up making a lot more money.
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We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"My work with Jim has stepped-up my marketing program, making it easier for me to follow-up on deals while continually creating a steady stream of solid new leads for me to work on."
John Kilroy
John Kilroy Realtors
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
Topics: Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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Keys to Becoming a Great Commercial Real Estate Negotiator
By Jim Gillespie | June 4, 2014
As a commercial real estate broker working on straight commission, your livelihood depends on you becoming a great negotiator. If you don’t become a great negotiator, your deals don’t close, and you don’t earn and get paid commissions. It’s just that simple.
Sometimes becoming a great negotiator means that you’re managing two massive egos on the opposite sides of the transaction—people who would rather cost themselves a ton of money than ever end up feeling that the other side got the better of them during the negotiations. When you’ve been in commercial brokerage for many years, you’ve encountered situations where the two sides got very close to both agreeing on the price, but neither one would then budge from their previous offer in the end. This refusal of them to budge often has much more to do with them not wanting to let the other side feel like they’ve won, than it has to do with whether or not the price that’s being offered is reasonable.
In commercial real estate brokerage, you’re oftentimes dealing with people who don’t need to take any transaction that you’re proposing to them. It’s oftentimes more a matter of whether or not they feel they can win in the negotiations with the other side, and the more entrepreneurial your decision maker is, the more oftentimes this will be the case.
So the better that you become at managing big egos, and at keeping them stimulated and interested in still moving forward with the negotiations, the more successful you’ll be in your brokerage career.
It can feel sometimes like you’re managing two ravenous tigers, with both of them circling right in front of each other, letting the other one know who’s going to win. With this in mind, you’ll want to learn how to maintain the ideal tension during negotiations so that when one of them finally lunges forward and grabs the price that the other one is now offering, both of them will still feel that they got the better of the other one during the negotiations.
This necessitates both skill and a solid understanding of human psychology, which you will cultivate during your brokerage career.
So be committed to learning as you go along. When transactions fall apart and the principals end up walking away from the table, ask yourself, "What could we have done differently along the way to have consummated this transaction?"
Sometimes the underlying problem can lie in the number of offers and counteroffers that were being exchanged between the two parties during the negotiations. Sometimes, if you have a number of different offers and counteroffers that have been exchanged, the energy in the negotiations can just die. This is often because people can just feel that they’ve already given too much, as is indicated by them already having raised their initial offer several times. "If the other side hasn’t been willing to accept any of my previous offers," the principal can then assume, "then they’re just asking me to give them way too much."
So you’ll want to become a master at keeping the optimal level of negotiating tension going on within your transactions, keeping the tigers still interested in circling right in front of each other, to maximize the probability that you’ll then close the transaction.
This is one skill you’ll develop throughout your brokerage career by observing, learning, asking yourself the right questions, and by both developing and utilizing a solid sense of intuition.
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We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"After 20 years in real estate I needed to revive my business and look at new options and ideas. Together Jim and I evaluated my entire business plan, designed new strategies, and implemented a game plan that’s now making more money for both me and my team."
Bill Ukropina
Coldwell Banker Commercial
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
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Getting Paid $1,000.00 Retainers from Your Commercial Real Estate Clients
By Jim Gillespie | May 21, 2014
We could learn much in commercial real estate brokerage from industries that get advance retainers from their clients, such as the legal profession. Exclusive listings have been common for many decades now within our industry, but getting exclusive right-to-represent agreements signed with our tenants and buyers still isn’t always the norm.
A simple approach that brokers could utilize when beginning to work with buyers and tenants could include a statement like the following to them:
"In moving forward, we need to get a $1,000.00 fully-refundable retainer from you. This $1,000.00 retainer will be refunded back to you when we close our transaction."
The more that you impress upon your people that this is a "good faith" retainer that shows you that they’re serious, and that it will be refunded when they’ve closed the transaction with you, the easier it will be for them to then move forward and give you the money.
Even when you don’t have a signed exclusive right-to-represent agreement in place, having a retainer like this will help to bond the client even more to you, and help you to keep them even more loyal towards you. As an example of this, the lending industry is very smart in charging people an up-front application fee, or a loan processing fee. The fee may be only $250.00 to $500.00, but it keeps the client committed to the same lender or agent until the client knows whether or not they’ve qualified for the loan. The client normally won’t risk moving onto another lender and losing the $250.00 to $500.00 fee, unless they know they need to.
Similarly, you could do this within your own brokerage business, too. Just set the retainer fee at whatever the appropriate level will be for the size of the transaction…$1,000.00, $2,500.00, $5,000.00, or perhaps even more. In addition, make sure that doing this is in alignment with the laws in the state or the jurisdiction that you’re licensed and selling or leasing real estate in.
When reimbursing someone the $1,000.00 retainer from your commission that’s been received from a transaction, for example, you’ll want to make sure that all of the parties involved in the transaction have agreed in advance to this in writing. On top of this, you’ll want the written words for how the $1,000.00 retainer will be handled to be very clear to your client, too. You don’t want them mistakenly believing that if they jump ship and end up closing a transaction with another broker, that you’ll be refunding their retainer to them.
Getting buyers and tenants to become even more loyal to you is extremely important, So ideally you’ll want to have an exclusive right-to-represent agreement in place when you’re working with these people at all times. But when this isn’t possible, and you’d still like to work along with these people, getting an up-front retainer can help you to inspire even more client loyalty from them.
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Click here to learn about my Commercial Real Estate Newsletter that you can mail or E-mail to your clients and prospects every month.
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We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"My work with Jim is making me more effective at finding new business with the kind of companies I want to work with."
Larry Crumbley, SIOR, CCIM
Fickling & Company
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
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Can You Adapt and Change This Quickly in Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business?
By Jim Gillespie | May 7, 2014
As commercial real estate brokers, we have to learn how to adapt to change very quickly. One of the greatest skills that I’ve ever learned as a commercial real estate broker is how to anticipate something before it ever happens. As a broker, this will help you to alleviate potential problems long before they ever become major problems in your transactions. In addition, if you implement this approach into your own life outside of commercial real estate brokerage, it will help you immeasurably there, too.
I’m going to share a video with you that really made me laugh. It reminded me of how well we as brokers learn how to respond to the unexpected, even though the video itself takes place in a completely different environment.
The video also shows us how people are willing to say things about someone else when they’re certain the person isn’t there, but they’d never, ever say these same things right to the person’s face.
So imagine that you‘re talking with a colleague about your true, honest feelings towards a client who tried to cut you out of a commission. Then imagine that the client is suddenly right next to you, and they heard everything that you said about them.
Then click here to watch the video.
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Click here to learn about my Commercial Real Estate Newsletter that you can mail or E-mail to your clients and prospects every month.
__________________
We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"Jim has helped me to organize a game plan and work it with the tenacity that’s producing a greater number of transactions for me in my marketplace."
Scott Wilcott
NAI Capital
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
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How Google Glass Can Help Transform Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business
By Jim Gillespie | April 23, 2014
Take a look at what one agent has been doing to sell properties successfully in Australia. He’s been utilizing Google Glass smart glasses to give people an interactive experience of him virtually touring them through properties.
In addition to you being able to tour people through properties like this, one additional arena where I think this could definitely be of value would be whenever you’re going after a listing and you’re competing against other brokers to get it. Imagine giving your owner a "virtual tour" experience with this kind of technology, and telling them that you’ll then be making this experience available to everyone who’s interested in leasing or buying their property, once you begin marketing it for them.
As long as the property owner considers you to be someone they’d consider listing their property with, providing them with this kind of an experience will really help to differentiate you from everyone else.
Click here to read the article.
In addition, click here to read another article describing even more about this technology, and showing a video on how it can be utilized for giving virtual home tours. It will be very easy to do something similar to this for commercial property tours also.
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Click here to learn about my Commercial Real Estate Newsletter that you can mail or E-mail to your clients and prospects every month.
__________________
We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"My work with Jim has given me better scripting and new approaches to get more listings and exclusive right to represent agreements signed by my clients and prospects."
Mike Spedden
MacKenzie Commercial Real Estate Services
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
Topics: Marketing, Uncategorized |
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Are You On Track and Working Your Commercial Real Estate Game Plan for 2014?
By Jim Gillespie | April 8, 2014
The first quarter of the year is now behind us, so this is a good time to check in with you and see how you’re doing in working your commercial real estate game plan for the year.
So how are you doing?
Are you doing the things that will lead to developing a solid amount of new business for you between now and the end of the year? Or are you letting yourself slide?
How much prospecting have you been getting done every single week over the past 2-3 weeks? And…is this the amount of prospecting that will lead to you closing all the business you’ll want to be closing in 2014?
Generally speaking, you’ve got until the end of about August or September to both locate and begin working with the people that will result in closed transactions for you in 2014, so pace yourself accordingly, and make sure that you’re getting your prospecting done.
If I can be of assistance towards helping you to meet and exceed your income goals for the year, contact me and we’ll discuss what we’ll accomplish through working together.
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During my upcoming teleconference titled, "Building Wealth Through Investing in and Developing Real Estate", I’ll be interviewing an outstanding broker who’s become a very solid investor. During this interview he’ll be telling you how to raise all the cash to buy the best investment opportunities that you locate within your market, and how to get all the financing, too. To learn more about this teleconference and the three special bonuses that I’ll be giving you, click here.
__________________
Click here to learn more about my Commercial Real Estate Newsletter that you can mail or E-mail to your clients and prospects every month.
__________________
We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"I have had so many responses to the marketing letter I’ve mailed out that you wrote for me. Sellers have called in on properties they would like to sell, and the total dollar value of these properties so far is $56,000,000.00. I am blown away by the success of this program. One seller has an $8,000,000.00 property that we may already have a buyer for. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
Lisa Gilstrap
Lee & Associates
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
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Here’s the Best Book I’ve Ever Read on Making Solid Sales Presentations
By Jim Gillespie | March 25, 2014
Commercial real estate brokers can oftentimes deliver listing presentations that can feel very stale to the people listening to them. One of the big reasons this happens is because brokers oftentimes believe that what they need to be doing is delivering information, while not giving much thought to delivering a riveting performance.
"What? Delivering a riveting performance???", you may ask. "But we’re brokers, we’re business professionals, and we don’t need to be concerned with things like delivering a riveting performance."
But with this now being said, keep in mind that the sum total of your performance during your listing presentation will either leave your property owners excited about listing with you, or leave them indifferent about listing with you, or it can even have them become convinced that they’ll be hiring one of your competitors instead of you.
It’s not just about you presenting information to your people. It’s about how you present the information, getting them riveted on you, and having them really, really want to do business with you.
How to accomplish this within your own specific presentations is covered brilliantly by Oren Klaff in his book Pitch Anything, which is the best book I’ve ever read on making outstanding sales presentations. In this book the author shows how to move away from making presentations where you’re hoping that the prospect is going to hire you, and moving instead towards making presentations where the prospect is really, really wanting to do business with you.
Once you’ve then made this shift, you’ll be making your presentations much more dynamically, you’ll be bringing more excitement into your presentations in the exact moments when it’s needed, and your owners will feel more thrilled and excited about you than they’ll be feeling towards your competitors.
Oren Klaff really understands how the human mind operates, and his understanding of how to work within our mind’s own default programming is quite stunning. He has successfully utilized this approach many times to raise many millions of dollars from some of Wall Street’s savviest and most stubborn investors, and he tells stories within the book about what happened when he was making his presentations to these people.
Click here to read more information about this incredible book. I gave copies of this book to my regular coaching clients as gifts during the Holiday Season, and the feedback that I’ve received from many of these brokers about the book has been absolutely phenomenal!
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During my upcoming teleconference titled, "Building Wealth Through Investing in and Developing Real Estate", I’ll be interviewing an outstanding broker who’s also become a very solid investor. During this interview he’ll be telling you how to raise all the cash to buy the best investment opportunities that you find in your market, and how to get all the financing, too. To learn more about this teleconference and the three special bonuses that I’ll be giving to you, click here.
__________________
Click here to learn more about my Commercial Real Estate Newsletter that you can mail or E-mail to your clients and prospects every month.
__________________
We can transform your commercial brokerage business and get you making more money by doing one-on-one coaching work together. If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial brokerage business to the next level, click here and contact me.
"Jim’s coaching and training has assisted our company in landing millions of dollars of new real estate business."
Pat Hall
TOLD Partners
Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.
Topics: Persuasion, Uncategorized |
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