What We Can All Learn from My Daughter Jamie
By Jim Gillespie | October 20, 2009
My daughter Jamie recently began first grade. And she recently took a children’s karate class also and decided that she didn’t want to return for the second karate class.
Beginning first grade often means meeting new friends, and Jamie now has a new friend named Eva who she hangs out with during both recess and lunch. But during recess and lunch there are boys who have been coming over and teasing both Jamie and Eva, and Jamie finally decided she had had enough.
"I know karate," Jamie said the other day to these boys. And she looked at them with a serious look on her face, jumped into a karate stance with her arms extended out in front of her, and screamed out at the top of her lungs when she hit the ground, "Ha!" Then she spun around in a 360 degree-turn, and did a high leg kick right in front of their faces.
The boys then immediately ran away, leaving Jamie and Eva to play completely undisturbed with each other.
And when my wife, Ledys, came to pickup Jamie from school that day, Jamie looked at her mother and said, "Mommy, I want to keep going to the karate classes."
Now what many of us can learn from this is, "If what you’re doing isn’t working, you need to try something different." And with this in mind some of the questions you may want to be asking yourself as a broker these days are:
1) Who’s motivated to buy, sell, or lease right now?
2) How can I find these people?
3) What do I need to do to have these people work with me as their commercial broker?
And along these lines it’s important to have investors lined up with cash who can act quickly when the right opportunity comes, as more and more owners and lenders will be selling for unbelievable prices the deeper we get into this recession. As an example of this, click here for an article about a building that just sold for $31,000,000.00, just 37% of what it sold for a little over two years ago, because the owners were motivated, the buyer had cash, recognized the opportunity, and took immediate action.
More of these kinds of opportunities will definitely be coming your way as a commercial real estate broker, so get prepared!
(HINT–And as you’re getting prepared, make sure to read what the purchaser of the building said about how much more real estate they’re going to buy!)
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If you’re interested in what top commercial brokers can teach you to explode your commercial real estate brokerage business and take it to the next level, click here for my E-book containing commercial real estate prospecting scripts, and my live audio interviews with top commercial real estate brokers.
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Why Sale/Leasebacks Could Be Your Ticket to More Commercial Real Estate Commissions
By Jim Gillespie | October 7, 2009
With so many brokers looking for new ways to find opportunities and close more transactions, sale/leasebacks may be emerging as a way for brokers to make this happen.
With state and local governments, as well as Corporate America struggling to find more cash, a sale/leaseback may be exactly what these entities are looking for in order to raise this cash for themselves. And because many of these entities are becoming even more motivated to make a deal in order to get their hands on the cash, this may be the exact ticket both you and your investors are looking for right now.
A sale/leaseback allows either the government or the company to sell their building, raise the cash that’s needed for their ongoing operations, and sign a lease to remain in the building for 5-20 years or more. And because the underlying motivation on the ownership end is to get more cash, you now have a motivated seller who must sell at today’s fair market value to an investor, in order to get this cash. And this can seem like a breath of fresh air as compared with so many other owners who have been saying things similar to, "If you can get me the price my building would have sold for at the top of the market 2-3 years ago I’m a seller, but otherwise don’t bother me with any other offers."
How motivated do you think owner/users might be to discuss a sale/leaseback with one of your investors? As an example, one of my one-on-one coaching clients under my direction sent letters out to all of the owner/users in his database, and he got 29 phone calls from owner/users wanting to discuss doing a sale/leaseback on their property! So these sale/leaseback opportunities may be emerging in your territory for you right now also, you just need to begin contacting the owner/users in your area and begin discussing this idea with them.
And even if you talk with an owner/user and they’re not ready to do a sale/leaseback right now, they may become ready within the coming months. Because if they end up needing cash even more in the months ahead, they may then recognize that the sale/leaseback is their only option to raise this cash…and you definitely want to be in front of them at that exact time they reach this decision.
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If you’ve ever wanted to design your own agent Web site and you want to make sure to do it in the best way imaginable, click here for my audio interview with top real estate Web expert Michael Russer. In this interview you’ll learn how to design a Web site that gets you business, how to differentiate yourself from your competitors, how to maximize the amount of visitors to your Web site, and how to convert your Web visitors into clients that you close transactions with.
Topics: Prospecting |
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Persuading Your Commercial Real Estate Clients and Prospects to Do Business With You
By Jim Gillespie | September 22, 2009
The keys to persuading your clients and prospects to do business with you are subtle. Because if they ever perceive that you’re trying to persuade them, your attempt to do this is likely to backfire on you…because no one wants to work with a salesperson who they feel is trying to manipulate them. And it’s these blatant attempts at manipulation that end-up giving salespeople a bad reputation.
In short, the more your clients and prospects trust you, the more easily you’ll be able to persuade them. Because these people all need your guidance, and when they know they can trust you they’ll relax more and let you guide them all the way through their next real estate transaction.
And there’s no more important time for building the effective foundation for persuasion than in the very beginning of your relationship with someone. Because it’s this first impression and their early impressions that have people get a feeling of whether or not they can trust you, and whether or not they want to do business with you.
With this in mind, here are three important questions to be asking yourself to determine whether or not you’re doing your best to lay the proper foundation for doing more business with your clients and prospects:
1) Are you well-dressed…at least to the level of the top commercial brokers in your marketplace?
Because if you’re not, I can almost guarantee that it’s costing you money. First impressions are extremely important, and if your prospects are getting better first impressions from your competitors than they are from you, you’re going to be losing business to your competitors.
This may sound like a simple subject that you’ve probably heard about before, but it’s an extremely important one. How you look, act, and sound to people creates a feeling within them about whether or not they’ll want to do business with you. So you want to make sure you’re dressed in a manner that will have your people have an even better impression of you than they do of your competitors.
And as long as we’re talking about creating good first impressions, when I first began my full-time brokerage career right out of college back in 1980, I was driving a high-performance Ford Mustang that I absolutely loved. But as much as I loved that car, I couldn’t continue driving it in my brokerage business and pretend that it wasn’t hurting my success, and one of my first prospects was direct enough to point this out to me. So I bought a more conservative luxury car, a Cadillac Seville, but still continued to drive my Mustang every waking moment when I wasn’t working.
You have to keep in mind that your clients and prospects are going to be making one of the most important financial decisions of their lives in their next real estate transaction, so you want the clothes that you wear and the car that you drive to reflect that you’re someone who has the success and experience to expertly guide them along the way in this next transaction. I think most of us, if we were to interview an investment expert for the first time and saw that they were driving a small, inexpensive economy car, we might wonder if they really had the level of financial success to guide us to where we wanted to be ourselves financially. So keep in mind that your commercial real estate prospects could easily be thinking like this, too.
2) Do you come across as being a true expert at what you do in commercial real estate brokerage?
Dressing the part and driving the right car are one thing, but you need to also be congruent with the image you’re creating and be able to talk intelligently about what’s happening in your marketplace. And you need to do it with a presentation style that’s engaging to your people, too.
WARNING: Avoid using jargon terms that you’ve learned in commercial real estate brokerage. Any terms like BOV, BPO, PTR, LTV, COLA, and C-Suite. And if you don’t know what some of these terms I’ve just mentioned mean, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about here. When brokers throw out jargon terms like those, they make their prospects feel like they should already know what those terms mean. And when the prospect doesn’t know what those terms mean they feel stupid…and the last thing you want to have happen when trying to build a relationship with someone, is to have them feel stupid whenever they’re around you.
3) Do you convey to your clients and prospects that what you stand for is serving their own best interests at all times, far above and beyond the importance of you earning a commission?
Because if you don’t convey this your clients and prospects will most likely end up working with one of your competitors instead of you. And they’ll never tell you that it was because they didn’t trust you either. There are a lot of commercial brokers out there who think that they’re so very smooth with their presentation style, and that their clients and prospects will never know that they’re willing to bend corners when it comes to them getting paid a commission.
Don’t be one of them.
The people you’re doing business with have gotten to where they are in life because they’re smart, and along with that intelligence usually comes a well-developed sense of intuition.
The crazy thing about this business is that the more that you take care of your people and the more they get that you’re about serving their own best interests, the more they’ll want to work with you, and the more they’ll refer you to other people they know that you can work with, too.
I mean, wouldn’t you want to work with a salesperson who made you feel that way? And wouldn’t you probably be loyal to them and refer other people to work with them, too?
So when you create the feeling of trust within people, they’re more likely to relax and let you guide them more easily through their next commercial real estate transaction. And that’s one of the most effective forms of persuasion that any salesperson could ever want to achieve.
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If you want to learn more about persuading your clients and prospects, my next Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle Teleconference call is titled "Mastering Your Power Persuasion Skills". And in terms of my expertise in this arena, the title of my 210-page dissertation for my Ph.D. degree was "Utilizing Rapport, NLP, and the Hypnotic Language Patterns of Milton H. Erickson in Commercial/Industrial Real Estate Sales and Leasing". If you’d like to learn how to more effectively persuade your commercial real estate clients and prospects to move forward and take action with you, and learn how to more effectively overcome all their objections, click here for more information on this teleconference.
Topics: Persuasion |
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Why Your Clients Should Be Investing in Commercial Real Estate Right Now
By Jim Gillespie | August 26, 2009
In today’s economy many of your clients are looking for security, and it’s not easy for them to be certain about which investments will really provide this security for them. So because many investors own both stocks and commercial real estate, which of these two types of investments is the better one for your clients to be investing in right now?
In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler may have summed it all up best when he said:
“By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary base by $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn’t put money directly into the stock market, but he didn’t have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybe commodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bond funds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars he cranked out didn’t go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets. In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market.”
In addition, stock market analysts have done the calculations and have discovered that a recent $2.7 trillion jump in the value of equities in the stock market, corresponded with only a $400 billion drop during the exact same period in money market accounts. So where did this additional $2.3 trillion rise in the value of equities come from? From the bailout money being given to the U.S. banks and financial institutions, and the reinvestment of that money by these institutions directly back into the stock market!
So the stock market is on much shakier ground than what most people believe right now, and these bailouts can’t keep this game going on forever. So there will come a time when the market will correct for all of this, and you don’t want to be holding your investments in the form of stocks when that time gets here.
And since major, reputable companies aren’t paying much in dividends these days, the primary investment play in the stock market is in betting that stock values will be rising. And with the information we’ve just been discussing, that’s looking like a very risky bet for your clients to be making over the coming months.
If you’re interested in producing even better results in your brokerage business by working with me one-on-one as your commercial real estate coach, send me an E-mail at JimGillespie2@Roadrunner.com.
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The Condition of Today’s USA Commercial Real Estate Industry
By Jim Gillespie | August 13, 2009
I definitely feel your pain as a commercial real estate broker operating in today’s economy. With some rare exceptions, most commercial brokers I talk with tell me that many of the brokers in their area are making 25-50% of the money that they were making just 2-3 years ago.
While much of what I do every single day is give brokers strategies to overcome what’s happening in our economy and beat their competition in the marketplace, I think at the same time it’s also important right now for me to show you what’s going on in commercial real estate all over the country. So just in case you thought it was only you, the brokers in your office, or the brokers in your own territory who were having a difficult time…think again.
With this in mind there are two articles I’m forwarding to you here to read. This first article, from GlobeSt.com, mentions something that I found to be quite staggering for me to come to terms with. When comparing the information for the total volume of properties selling from within portfolios valued at $5,000,000.00 and higher, during the first half of 2009, that total dollar volume is only 7% of what it was back in 2007 ($18.78 billion vs. $267 billion).
Click here to read the article.
And this second article discusses what’s been going on collectively in the office, industrial, and retail markets here in the USA, and cites data that’s been provided by CoStar group:
Click here to read the article.
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If you think that you’d produce even better results in your brokerage business by working along with me one-on-one as your commercial real estate coach, send me an E-mail at JimGillespie2@Roadrunner.com.
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Positioning Yourself for High-Powered Commercial Real Estate Success
By Jim Gillespie | August 4, 2009
So many commercial brokers lose sight of the fact that they’re constantly being compared to their competitors. They think that by calling a prospect on the phone 1-3 times a year and having conversations with the prospect, that they’re doing the best they can to position themselves to close the prospect’s next transaction with them.
But they’ve completely lost sight of the fact that other brokers are doing the same thing, and that some of these brokers are even having face-to-face meetings with these same prospects, too. And when brokers are having face-to-face meetings with their prospects, they’re building a much more solid bond with their prospects than what will be accomplished through telephone conversations alone. In effect, the brokers having these face-to-face meetings are positioning themselves ahead of their competition, and doing what will have them land more business with these prospects.
There are so many things that brokers can do to position themselves ahead of their competition, and stand out in their prospects’ minds whenever the prospect is ready to hire a broker for their next requirement. And the broker who does these things in their business will constantly leave their competition behind them.
With this in mind, here’s one more suggestion you can consider implementing into your own brokerage business:
Get photos taken of yourself with your local, state, and national politicians, and utilize them in both your mailings and in your listing presentations.
Elected officials will typically make themselves available for you to have your photo taken with them. You just need to arrange for this by calling their office and setting an appointment with them. And if you think that a $50.00-$100.00 contribution towards the person’s political campaign will help you to arrange an appointment, this could be one of the best investments you’ll ever make!
So have your photo taken with your Mayor, the City Council person who’s in charge of your commercial real estate district, your State Assembly person, and your elected member of Congress. Then utilize these photos as I’ve mentioned above in your mailers and in your listing presentations. And of course, include text underneath each photo mentioning both your name and the politician’s name, and perhaps even mentioning the subject matter of the discussion you were having with the politician at the time.
These photos can impress many of the people you’ll want to do business with, and can help you to stand out from your competition. In addition, they can create the feeling of you being connected as a political insider, and people want to do business with people they feel have connections.
So begin contacting your elected officials and arrange to have your photo taken with them. And the good news is, as an additional bonus, you could begin feeling that for once in your life politicians are actually doing something for you that puts a smile on your face!
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Click here to join my next Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle teleconference call for FREE. The subject of my upcoming teleconference call is, "Becoming a Master at Getting Exclusive Listings", and during this teleconference call I’ll interview a highly-successful broker and one-on-one coaching client of mine who currently has 60 listings on commercial properties!
Topics: Marketing, Persuasion, Prospecting |
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Building the Foundation for Powerful Commercial Real Estate Prospecting
By Jim Gillespie | July 27, 2009
Coaching commercial real estate brokers is a very rewarding career for me. Recently I began one-on-one coaching with a commercial broker who’s gotten burned out on doing his prospecting these days. When times were better several years ago he was much more enthusiastic about doing his prospecting, and he was producing much better results at that time, too. But the market’s changed, he’s not finding as many leads as he was back then, and he’s really had great difficulty making the same number of prospecting calls as he was back then because of all of this. In short, he hasn’t really been very excited about picking up the phone and calling his prospects these days.
So I asked him, “What kind of results do you think you’d produce in your business if you prospected 10-12 hours every week for the next year?” And he responded with, “I think I’d produce great results if I got that kind of prospecting done.”
“So the problem”, I said, “is your feeling about how the people on the phone are responding to you these days. You were enjoying prospecting much more when people were more interested in buying, selling, or leasing from you 2-3 years ago, and the fact that they’re not as interested in this right now is frustrating to you…and you don’t want to pickup the phone and call them anymore because of this.”
And he responded by saying to me, “Yes, that’s right.”
“So the solution to your problem is this”, I said. “You just need to pickup the phone and prospect 10-12 hours every week, and not have any attitude about how your prospects should be responding to you during your phone calls with them. Your problem has been that you’re frustrated that they’re not responding to you just like they were 2-3 years ago, and we’re in a completely different market right now. But if you just make your prospecting calls every week without having any attachment to this idea that they should be responding to you exactly like they were 2-3 years ago, you’re going to make a lot more money than you have been by not getting your prospecting done.”
And then there was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone after I said this to him, before his voice completely lit up in responding to me:
“Thank you so much for showing me this”, he said. “I’ve been letting my frustration about how people have been responding to me during my prospecting calls affect me, and it’s been killing the number of prospecting calls that I’ve been making. So if I just make the calls no matter what, and don’t have any attachment to how I feel people should be responding to me when I’m making the calls, I’ll make the greatest amount of money I could ever make in this market we’re in right now.”
Then the broker followed-up by sending me an E-mail just a few hours later, thanking me again for what we had discussed during our coaching call, and telling me he’s now got an entirely different attitude about getting his prospecting done every week.
So if you think you’re not making the number of prospecting calls that you should be, you might want to adopt this exact same approach when making your prospecting calls. Because in borrowing a line from the Kevin Costner movie, “Field of Dreams”, “If you prospect, their business will come.”
And in closing, you still may need to call more people in this market to produce the kind of results that you want to, but as one of my coaching clients constantly reminds himself, “Every transaction I’ve ever closed began with a prospecting call.”
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Click here for information on how you can join me on my FREE Webinar this Wednesday night, where I’ll be interviewing top government funding expert Sean Carpenter. Sean’s going to tell us about all the great ways you can get the government to fund your commercial real estate transactions for you, so that you can get more transactions closed right now in this market.
Topics: Prospecting |
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Getting the Attention of the REO Decision Makers for Commercial Real Estate
By Jim Gillespie | July 16, 2009
For 2-3 years now I’ve been telling commercial brokers to be building solid relationships with the REO decision makers for the institutions who’ve been lending on commercial properties. At that time it wasn’t obvious like it is now that lenders will be dealing with a ton of distressed properties, and the mad dash is now on for commercial brokers who are trying to get the attention of these people.
If you listened to my April Inner Circle call, you heard the Receiver who I interviewed discussing the criteria that he and other decision makers for distressed properties utilize when hiring brokers to list these properties. You also heard him talking about how these decision makers usually don’t have the time to return brokers’ phone calls when the brokers are calling to inquire about listing their properties.
So how else can you get these people’s attention? Through the mail. If they won’t return your phone calls, this is the perfect opportunity to brand yourself in their minds through your own mailing campaign. Keep in mind that all the other brokers are dealing with the exact same situation as you are…they’re leaving voicemail messages for these people, and these voicemail messages aren’t getting returned. So to differentiate yourself and step out of the pack and get yourself noticed, you need to be doing something different.
Mail to these decision makers twice or more a month, and ideally paint yourself as being a REO specialist in the type of property you work on. And if you can’t paint yourself as being a REO specialist, at least show these people that you’re an expert in the type of property you work on in your own geographical area. And as an alternative, you can also consider teaming-up with someone who is a REO specialist, and then market yourself together as a team.
One broker who I know showed me the postcards he’s already been sending to these decision makers. They paint him as being an expert at selling REO properties, and they show these decision makers the REO properties he’s already sold this year.
So if the REO decision makers you want to talk with aren’t returning your phone calls, start mailing to them. This will remind them of who you are when they see your information in their mail, and very few, if any of your competitors would ever compete with you by taking the time to mail to these people.
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If you’d like to know when this real estate market is going to turn around, there’s no one I know who’s better at understanding and predicting this than Robert Campbell. Click here to learn more about my interview with Robert, where he told me his simple formula to accurately predict when there will be a downturn in real estate, and when the market will once again recover.
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Determining Your Own Destiny in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
By Jim Gillespie | July 8, 2009
Despite so many brokers telling me how difficult it is to close transactions these days, there’s really a simple way to help determine your own destiny in this business. Sometimes destiny arrives on your doorstep, and sometimes you have to go out and make it arrive yourself. And clearly, this economy is one of those times when you have to go out and make it arrive.
And while we’re on the subject of destiny, let me tell you a story about how it once impacted my own family…
My parents were both born in a small town in Scotland. They never knew each other when they were children, and when my mother was six years old she and her family all moved to the United States, and settled near Detroit. But it was sixteen years later, when she was 22 years old back in 1938, that her family finally decided to go back to Scotland and spend some time there with their relatives.
And while this was going on, there’s no way my mother could’ve recognized that in stepping onto that ship back in 1938 and journeying back to her homeland, she was about to change her destiny once and forever. Because it was on that voyage, when she returned to the same small town she was born in, that she’d meet my father…the man she’d be married to for more than 51 years.
As my aunt, my father’s sister, likes to tell the story, “Your mother was working in a store in our neighborhood, and I was stunned at just how beautiful she really was. And she had these gorgeous patent leather shoes that I just couldn’t keep my eyes off of! So I went home and told your father about this beautiful woman who was working in our neighborhood, and the rest, as they say, is history!”
But success in your business right now probably isn’t going to come that easily to you. And it probably won’t even involve you getting onto a ship! But what’s important here is to recognize what you need to get done in order to be successful, and to not object to it. Because I’m hearing right now a lot of brokers objecting to what they know they need to get done to improve their businesses, instead of just getting it done. And if they just got this stuff done their lives would be so much easier, and they’d definitely be making more money.
So let me ask you…are you getting all of the prospecting done that you know you should be? And if you answer “No” to this question, are you still willing to do whatever it takes to achieve the success that you want to in our industry?
Because if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to achieve the success that you want, then ask “If I prospected 10-12 hours every week for the next year, what kind of results would I produce in my own business?” And if you like the answer to that question, just get your prospecting done…with no excuses.
My mother didn’t know that in stepping onto that ship back in 1938, she’d be changing the destiny of her life. But in some way, at some level, I think she knew that something important was going to happen to her.
I have a photo of her stepping onto that ship, and there’s always been something about this photo that’s called out to me and said, “She knew, on some level, that something important was about to happen to her.”
And as you can see from the photo, from the moment he laid eyes on her, my father didn’t have much of a chance of not falling in love with her…:)
Click here to see the photo.
Topics: Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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How to Spend Your Commercial Real Estate Marketing Dollars More Effectively
By Jim Gillespie | June 24, 2009
Sometimes commercial brokers will ask me, “Would I be better off advertising me (or my company) in the newspaper, or should I send direct mail to my clients and prospects instead?” And this is a question that many commercial brokers and companies are continually asking themselves these days.
But when you advertise you or your company in the newspaper, how many of your clients and prospects do you think will be looking at that ad on that exact page in the newspaper on the exact day you’re advertising? Probably a very small number of them.
But if you instead mailed postcards, articles, a newsletter, or other information to your clients and prospects, and addressed the mail to the actual names of the individual decision makers, you’re almost guaranteed to at least get your marketing pieces into their offices, and hopefully into their own mailboxes, onto their desks, and in front of their eyes. With this in mind, the visibility of your marketing, your branding, and the impact of all of this on your clients and prospects will be much stronger when you mail to them instead of taking out an ad promoting you or your company in a newspaper or a magazine.
While the ad in the newspaper or magazine may look great to you, it won’t be seen by anywhere near the same number of your clients and prospects as anything you’ll be sending them in the mail.
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If you’d like to become more successful at getting commercial real estate property listings, click here to learn about my audio CD titled “How to Become the Listing King in Your Territory.”
Topics: Marketing, Uncategorized |
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