Your 5-Point Blueprint for Commercial Real Estate Success
By Jim Gillespie | May 7, 2008
I was talking with a veteran commercial broker on the telephone recently and he said the following to me:
“Real estate is easy. It’s the people who are difficult.”
And I found myself laughing in recognizing the truth in that statement that I had experienced many times myself throughout my own 20-year commercial real estate brokerage career. The problems in my own commercial real estate transactions usually revolved around the egos of the people I was dealing with, and how much they wanted to get their own way with the other principal. And when you add to this the fact that sometimes the other broker I was working through wanted everyone to know how important he was in the transaction, sometimes things got really interesting.
But when you’re in the heat of battle in your brokerage business, trying to get more things done than you seem to have time for, it’s helpful to have a target or blueprint to shoot for so you have a standard to measure your business by. With this in mind I’ve created an easy 5-point blueprint that I think is a good, simple target for you to follow. And if your production level isn’t where you want it to be right now, the chances are very high that you’re falling short in one or more of these 5 areas.
So here are the 5 areas of my blueprint system to help ensure your commercial real estate brokerage success:
1) Be prospecting 10-12 hours every week
There are very few income and production problems in commercial real estate brokerage that won’t be resolved by constantly prospecting 10-12 hours every week. Ask yourself the following question: “If I prospected 10-12 hours every week for the next 12 months with no excuses, how much income will I earn in my business?” And if you like your answer to that question just get your prospecting done with no excuses.
2) Send mailers to your clients and prospects twice or more every month
Mailing may be the most underutilized resource in commercial real estate brokerage. When you mail to your people 12-24 times a year or more, in addition to making your prospecting calls, you make it very difficult for them to think of working with anyone else. And if you’re ever not getting your prospecting done you’ll still be prospecting your people through what you’re sending to them in the mail every month.
The best marketer in our industry who I know of spends more than $100,000.00 a year in marketing himself, including sending mailers to his clients and prospects five to seven times every month. So remember…mailing works in a big way in commercial real estate brokerage!
3) Have a database that includes every prospect you want to do business with, their individual names, phone numbers, the properties they own or occupy, and their mailing addresses
You can’t prospect all the people you want to if they’re not in your database. And if your database has holes in it you’re missing out on prospecting a lot of people you could be closing transactions with. This costs you a lot of money that’s just waiting to be discovered by you in your territory.
4) Build great long-term relationships with your past clients, take them to lunch, socialize with them, and give them gifts 2-4 times a year
You want to continue building relationships with the people you’re closing transactions with so you get additional business from them in the future. Socializing with them and giving them gifts builds the bond that will lead to future transactions with them. And if you don’t do this you’ll be competing with all of the other brokers once again for your clients’ next transactions without having any inside advantage with the clients. Or even worse you’ll find out that your client closed a transaction with another broker and you never even knew that your client was looking to do another real estate transaction. Spending $100.00-$200.00 a year on gifts for every one of your clients, to position yourself to earn more than $10,000.00 in commissions with every one of them three years from now on their next transactions, is a great investment of your time, energy, and money.
5) Work on your presentation skills so you continually improve them and deliver the best presentations of any broker in your market
When you improve your presentation skills and close more transactions with them, you’re making more money without needing more prospects to make it happen. But when you combine improving your presentation skills along with doing 10-12 hours of prospecting every week, you’ll then experience explosive growth in your business. The big problem here is that most brokers find the presentation style that makes them feel the most comfortable, which has nothing to do with finding the presentation style that compels the greatest amount of people to work with them. I recommend that you role play your presentation with someone acting as the decision maker along with you, and videotape the presentation. And when you watch the videotape I can almost guarantee you’ll see things you’ll want to change in your presentation immediately, which will then have you close more business.
So take a look at these 5 areas of my blueprint and see how you measure-up right now in your own brokerage business. And when you find yourself approaching the ideal in all 5 of these areas, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be thrilled with your success and the amount of money you’ll be making in your brokerage business.
Topics: Blogroll, Marketing, Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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A Commercial Broker Who Fell from Grace in Our Industry
By Jim Gillespie | April 7, 2008
I don’t know if it’s just me who’s thinking this, but it seems that it’s a lot harder to find modern-day heroes these days. I look at what just recently happened to Elliot Spitzer, a man who was greatly admired for taking on some of the most corrupt people in the business world, and as it turns out Spitzer himself was indulging in activities that were in direct conflict with what he had been fighting to eliminate. And when it was announced on the trading floor of the stock exchange that Spitzer had been accused of wrongdoing himself, many people on the floor erupted into cheers and applause. Apparently they didn’t like the fact that this man took a stand for eliminating corruption within their industry, and that he wanted to hold people accountable for defrauding the public.
And when I heard about this response from the people on the trading floor several weeks ago I found myself wondering, “Would commercial brokers cheer and applaud if the same thing had happened to someone who successfully prosecuted corrupt commercial brokers within our industry? Would commercial brokers really be angry at someone who had fined or removed people from our industry who were defrauding investors out of large sums of their money?” I don’t think so. Which makes me wonder about what kind of people we’re really dealing with there on the trading floor of the stock exchange.
Your reputation is everything in your commercial real estate brokerage career, so make sure you do everything you can to maintain it. Brokers will definitely talk about you with other brokers, and if you do anything out of line to try and take advantage of another broker, the story will spread like wildfire within your brokerage community. People will talk about what you did and they’ll avoid doing business with you, and this will end up costing you a lot of money.
And you just never know when the story will fall into the hands of someone who may write an article about it, too. With this in mind, here’s a story about someone I’ve known for decades as a commercial broker, who we’ll call Bill (which is not really his name).
Bill and I have both been prominent figures in the Southern California commercial real estate brokerage community, both having risen to prominent positions within the major real estate association for commercial brokers in the area. In addition, Bill also received a prestigious award from one of the two most respected national commercial real estate brokerage associations.
A number of years ago I introduced Bill to one of my best friends, let’s call him Dave, because Dave invested in industrial real estate in the geographical area that Bill works in. And when my friend Dave told me what Bill had done to him while working on a real estate transaction last year, something that could have cost Bill his real estate license, or at the minimum a suspension of the license, my stomach began to really tighten-up. After all, Bill is someone I used to play golf with on a regular basis before I had to give up the game for health reasons…mental health reasons…because the game used to drive me crazy!
Here’s the scenario of what happened between Bill and Dave:
1) Bill obtained a sublease listing from a tenant who was occupying one of Dave’s buildings.
2) Bill located a potential subtenant for the building, but Dave wouldn’t approve the sublease. The potential subtenant was financially weaker than the current tenant in Dave’s building, and was engaged in a business that Dave thought could be damaging to his building.
3) When the tenant found out that Dave wouldn’t approve the sublease, the tenant called Dave directly to have a conversation with him.
4) Several minutes into the conversation, after explaining his reasons for not approving the sublease, Dave asked the tenant the following question:
“As soon as you knew that you didn’t need the building anymore, why didn’t you just call me and ask me if the two of us could work something out?” The tenant then responded with, “That’s the very first thing I asked Bill to do as my broker. I told him to call you and ask you that exact same question, and he told me that you had completely refused to work anything out with me.”
5) Dave then responded with, “I can tell you that conversation never happened.”
Then immediately afterward Dave and the tenant agreed to cancel the remaining portion of the lease, letting the tenant walk away with no further obligations.
In looking at this, all I’m left to believe is that Bill as the broker might have thought that he wouldn’t collect a commission, or as much of a commission, if the lease had been cancelled, leading him down an entirely different path of action.
And as you’re reading this recognize that there are thousands and thousands of readers reading this along with you. I’ve chosen to not mention Bill by his real first name, but other brokers who may do something similar might not be as fortunate when people find out the real story about what they did. It used to be that stories like these would spread primarily through telephone conversations, but now everyone is just one click away from everyone else knowing about it. And I’m wondering how many people who know Bill already know about it.
So you’ll want to take the high road in your commercial real estate brokerage business, and make sure you treat both your principals and the brokers you cooperate with in a manner you’ll be proud of.
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Join Me for My Live Teleseminar Wednesday Night When I’ll Reveal
The 12 Important Secrets of Top Commercial Brokers
As you’re a subscriber to my real estate E-newsletter, I’m inviting you to join me for an exciting free telephone seminar this Wednesday, April 9th, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, when I’ll reveal the 12 important secrets that have top-producing commercial real estate brokers consistently make amazing amounts of money every year, and I’ll interview four special guest experts in these arenas!
For more information on this FREE teleseminar and how you can signup for it, please click here.
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Where’s the Outstanding Commercial Broker Marketing in Our Industry?
By Jim Gillespie | February 25, 2008
When I first got into commercial brokerage full-time in 1980, the emphasis on developing one’s business was almost entirely on prospecting. And now in 2008 there’s not a lot that’s really changed in our industry. The focus is still pretty much on prospecting.
Now prospecting represents a great opportunity to develop one’s commercial brokerage business, it’s just that it’s also very limiting for brokers. For one thing most commercial brokers don’t want to do it, and they end up oftentimes only doing it when they don’t have enough good leads to work on. Then once they develop a good amount of new leads to follow-up on from their prospecting, they stop doing their prospecting. So the process of developing new leads to work on can become intermittent for many brokers, and their income will suffer because of their lack of an ongoing abundance of great new leads.
One activity that’s common in industries outside of commercial brokerage, including residential real estate brokerage, is principals and business owners marketing themselves outside of just doing prospecting. Web sites, mailing, E-newsletters, and keeping people informed on what’s going in their area is very common practice for top residential agents. But all of this is almost non-existent on the commercial side of the business.
Which has led me to develop the following motto:
“Show me a commercial broker who says mailing doesn’t work and I’ll show you a commercial broker who’s never had much of a mailing campaign.”
Drawing the conclusion that mailing doesn’t work after sending out one or two mailers is like drawing the conclusion that prospecting doesn’t work after doing just one hour of it.
Some commercial brokerage companies still don’t even have Web sites, and it’s very rare for a commercial agent to have his or her own standalone agent Web site. Between having a Web site, sending out an E-newsletter, and mailing to your clients and prospects two more more times a month, you have an opportunity to completely stand out from all your competitors and keep yourself in the forefront of the minds of all your clients and prospects. This is a golden opportunity for many commercial brokers but very few ever take advantage of it. And then these same brokers will often wonder at the end of the year why they still haven’t made the amount of money that they wanted to.
The ultimate cardinal sin of marketing that I still see some entrepreneurial brokerage companies making is having their E-mail addresses with their own domain name in them, but not having any Web site already up and running when you type that domain name into your browser. I can’t believe that the people running these companies don’t recognize that people are going to go to their Web site when they show their own E-mail address as something similar to bob@rfkcommercial.com on their business cards. And lo and behold when the prospect goes to the Web site there’s nothing there, making the company look very unprofessional. The principals of the company have enabled the domain to send and receive the company’s E-mail, but there’s no Web site there. This is the Internet equivalent of showing the company’s office address on one’s business cards, but when your clients and prospects go there, there’s no office.
And when it comes to doing great marketing, a few months ago on one of my Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle Teleconference calls, I interviewed a commercial broker who spends more than $100,000.00 a year on marketing himself to his clients and prospects. And as part of his marketing program he mails to his clients and prospects 5-7 times every single month. This had him close more than $55 million in total sales and leasing volume last year, in a city with a population of just 50,000 people, which sits in a larger region with a total population of just 620,000 people.
So with all of this being said, here’s the summary of what I recommend to you:
If you’re relying only on prospecting to develop new brokerage business you’re costing yourself a lot of money. Especially if you’re not always getting your prospecting done. Develop a newsletter and send it out regularly. Write articles on what’s going on in your marketplace and send them to your people. Or send them postcards with information they’ll definitely want to know about.
When you mail to your clients and prospects two or more times every month over the next year, I can almost guarantee you’ll never go back to the old way of doing brokerage, because you’ll be making a lot more money.
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Join Me for My Live Teleseminar Wednesday When I’ll Reveal
The 4 Important Activities of Top Commercial Brokers
In my more than 25 years as a commercial real estate broker, trainer, and coach I’ve discovered the 4 important activities that have top producing commercial brokers make tons of money in their businesses. If you don’t know what these 4 activities are, then you’re costing yourself a ton of money, as these 4 activities determine more than 80% of your commercial brokerage income.
Join me this Wednesday night, February 27th, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, for a free teleseminar where I’ll tell you all about these 4 activities, and show you how to make big money in your brokerage business by implementing them.
If your real estate market is transitioning right now, you need to know about these 4 important activities.
To learn more about this FREE teleseminar on Wednesday night on these 4 important activities click here.
Topics: Marketing, Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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It’s All Part of the Rich Tapestry of Life
By Jim Gillespie | February 11, 2008
My commercial real estate brokerage career was cruising along in 1994. We were in the middle of a recession here in Southern California, but I’d been through one of these ten years earlier in my brokerage career also. It wasn’t fun, but I knew that if I just continued to do everything I could to grow my business, I’d soon see the recession in my rearview mirror.
But I really had no idea how much my life was going to change, and how most everyone I had counted on would no longer be around.
It all started when my wife and I began to get divorced, and then it pretty much went downhill from there. Within two months after beginning our divorce my father had a heart attack, followed by a stroke two months later, and then he spent six weeks deteriorating in the hospital until he finally passed away.
Many people might think that struggling through a recession in commercial real estate, going through divorce, and having my father die simultaneously would be quite a lot to experience all at one time. And when you add to this the fact that my father was one of my absolute best friends in life, it made it all that much more difficult for me to deal with.
But that wasn’t everything that I was going to experience. After my father died I was now responsible for my mother, who I came to recognize was progressing with Alzheimer’s Disease, and my sister, who had been schizophrenic for many years. So within a very short period of time my life had been turned completely upside down, and my entire foundation of the important people I had leaned upon throughout my life was crumbling all around me.
So for years I watched my mother and my sister deteriorate with their degenerative illnesses, and then my mother passed away. And when that happened I began to see what I was convinced was the light at the end of the tunnel. I needed to get my sister into a board and care facility as she had lived with my parents almost her entire life, and living with them wasn’t going to be an option for her anymore. I thought it would take maybe six months for her to adjust to her new surroundings, and that eventually she’d begin adding some new friends into her life. And I thought that once she made the adjustment, my life would begin to get better.
And that may have been the biggest miscalculation of my life.
Before my mother passed away my sister had been hospitalized only once in her life that I could ever remember, but that was soon going to change. She soon began to be hospitalized for different health problems, and at one time just a few months after my mother had passed away, she was totally unconscious and completely motionless for nine days. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her, and all the tests they did on her showed no signs of her having any problems. But still she laid there in the hospital completely unconscious and motionless for nine days.
And when she finally woke up, all she could speak was gibberish, making no sense in her words and sentences at all. But fortunately after several days of doing only that, her speech began to return to normal.
So the light that I thought I saw at the end of the tunnel turned out to be anything but that, as my sister was then hospitalized 44 times over the next eight years. And in the process her schizophrenia became worse, as is what typically happens with degenerative illnesses. Right now she’s convinced that I’m not her brother, that I’m an imposter, and she orders me to leave immediately whenever I go to visit her. This is in complete contrast to who she was as a person soon after my mother passed away, when she told me how fortunate she felt she was to have me in her life.
So this particular journey for me has been a long one. While it’s been filled with much pain and loss, over time things have definitely gotten better for me. For seven years now I’ve been married to an incredible woman, and we have a beautiful 4 1/2 year-old daughter named Jamie. (Click here to see a photo of all of us.) And Jamie is truly one of the greatest joys I’ve ever known.
So no matter what difficulties we all go through in our lives from time-to-time, know that they’re going to pass. I learned to put one foot in front of the other one every day years ago when this all started happening, even during those days when that seemed to be about the only thing that I could do. As much as we want to create only good times, happiness, and abundance in our lives, we all have our own pain and difficulty to handle along the way.
When I think about all that I’ve experienced, and the difficulties that I see others experience in their own lives, maybe it can all be best summed up by something my father used to say to me when he’d see me experiencing difficulty when I was a kid growing up. He used to just turn and look at me, smile and say, “It’s all part of the rich tapestry of life.”
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How to Completely Transform Your Commercial Real Estate Presentation Skills
This Wednesday I’ll be interviewing Jerry Anderson in a live teleseminar on the subject of “Becoming a Master at Making Powerful Real Estate Presentations.” Throughout his career Jerry’s worked with some of the most successful commercial brokerage companies in our industry, helping their agents perfect their presentation skills. And improving your presentation skills has you close a greater number of transactions with your clients and prospects, making you more money.
To learn how you can join us for this live teleconference and receive the information, even if you can’t join us on the live call, click here.
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What the Heck is Going on With This Real Estate Market?
By Jim Gillespie | January 29, 2008
Within a one-week period I had three of my veteran successful commercial real estate coaching clients tell me, “I wish this market would get worse so I can start closing more transactions.”
But not every commercial real estate market across the country is experiencing the same thing. Some brokers are still reporting solid demand for buying and leasing properties in their own areas. But most brokers I talk with tell me that things have slowed down in their own areas, and it’s just a matter of how much.
So why the discussion by these veteran brokers about wanting the market to get worse? Because in many areas the market has slowed down very gradually and the owners are still acting like it’s a seller’s market, when it’s not. They oftentimes still want prices they could have gotten 1-2 years ago, and they refuse to negotiate on their price. And at the same time buyers aren’t willing to pay the prices that these sellers want either. So what we then have in some markets is a state of indifference, where owners are deciding not to sell their properties unless they get a high price for them, and buyers are refusing to pay these prices. So in the end there’s a state of indifference in both buyers and sellers about consummating transactions, and indifference on both of these sides is a nightmare for commercial brokers. We get paid when people are motivated to close transactions, not when they’re indifferent about it, or not very interested in it.
At the same time I see some completely ridiculous articles being published telling us that the media is getting it wrong, that the market has now bottomed, and that good times and appreciation are already on their way to us. But the writers of these articles don’t give any analysis of the underlying fundamentals to support their conclusions–they give mostly hope supported by twisting what they’re observing in the marketplace to try and make us all feel good. One article that I read yesterday even made steam come out of my ears. The author not only said that the market had bottomed and that appreciation was on its way again, he said that the only interruption in the appreciation of property values throughout history in any area was caused when major employers suddenly left the area. I’d like to see him tell that to all the people nationwide who are seeing their property values depreciate without any major employers leaving their area. Property values have been going down here in my area of Southern California, and all of the major employers are still here in my area.
This last big runup in property values that lasted for years in many areas came primarily from easy financing being available to many people who shouldn’t have qualified for the financing. When you combine this with property values getting to levels that could no longer rise because of the income levels of everyone in the area, we had a total recipe for disaster. And once the easy financing disappeared, decimating great numbers of potential buyers, reality began to set in. Heck even at the top of the market in Malibu, California, a well known beachside suburb of Los Angeles, mobile homes on rented land in a mobile home park were selling for $1,100,000.00! That gives us an idea of how crazy things were getting in some areas, and what some of the lenders were willing to lend on.
But getting back to the three veteran brokers who want their markets to get worse, they want to see a solid pace of transactions going on again. And they recognize that this may only happen when owners know they’re not in control of the market anymore, and they get more motivated to sell and lease their properties. In the really hot markets buyers were buying properties at 4 and 5 percent cap rates, and they were seeing 20-30% annual appreciation with the properties, too. But now a 4 to 5 percent cap rate without any appreciation, or sometimes with depreciation now instead, just isn’t getting the buyers very excited. In addition, while home foreclosures are on the rise in many areas, owners of commercial properties typically have more staying power, meaning they’re not affected as easily when the market begins to turn, unlike many homeowners. So for commercial property owners to get motivated to lower their prices, they may need to begin feeling the pinch economically themselves. With this in mind more than once in my brokerage career have I seen an owner wait for two years to get $25,000.00 a month in rent for a building they could have rented for $23,000.00 two years earlier. And to be in a position to say goodbye to over $550,000.00 in rent while the building stays vacant for two years, you need to be doing much better than the rest of us.
If you’ve been reading my articles for sometime now you probably know that I do my best to shoot it straight with you. And fortunately at this time in my life there are very few rear ends that I have to kiss up to…which gives me more flexibility to shoot it straight with you…or at least to tell it to you the way that I really see it. But when I see some of these happy, pie-in-the-sky predictions being given to us by real estate journalists, though, it makes me laugh, and then it makes me sad. Because I know that keeping their job is sometimes dependent on telling people great news about real estate. Readers and advertisers with a vested interest in the market being good sometimes don’t want to hear the bad news…at least not repeatedly.
But first recognize that there are two different real estate markets you’re dealing with as a broker. One deals with whether property values are appreciating, depreciating, or staying the same. That’s the market that property owners and investors are concerned with, along with how well they’re doing with their returns on their properties. The second market deals with the volume of transactions closing in the marketplace, and that’s the one that really impacts your income in real estate brokerage. And when owners, buyers, and lessees are indifferent about closing transactions, or they don’t want to close transactions, this makes the market more difficult for you as a broker.
I wish I could tell you that the market has bottomed out in most locations, but I can’t. And when looking at the underlying fundamentals, I can’t see appreciation coming back until properties in many areas lose some more value. People and businesses can’t afford the higher prices now, and I don’t think we’re going to see those wild old days of easy financing returning anytime soon. They’ll be back again during the next real estate boom, but that’s not going to happen for awhile. The only possibility that I see for property values rising in the short term is if inflation gets a hold of us again and values begin rising as a result of the inflation. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen any serious inflation, but with the amount of money our government keeps pumping into the economy, a return of inflationary times could definitely happen. But that’s still not the same as experiencing real growth in wealth when property values appreciate while inflation remains low. In addition, many credible sources such as Goldman Sachs are predicting a recession here in the USA in 2008, and if this is true it certainly won’t help real estate values in bouncing back this year.
If you’re in a market where transactions are still proceeding at a solid pace, consider yourself fortunate. And if you’re not in one of those markets, you need to be doing more prospecting, marketing, and branding of yourself than you’ve ever done before. When you talk with top brokers who do a great job of marketing themselves, they’ll tell you that they spend more money on marketing in difficult times than they do in boom times. They recognize that they’re competing for a larger share of a smaller pie of transactions in their market, and they know that spending more money on marketing will get them to claim that larger share for themselves while other brokers are cutting back on their marketing.
And in closing, what may be most important for you in a transitioning market is keeping yourself in a state of mind of total and complete conviction in knowing that great opportunity is just around the corner, and that you’re right now in the process of discovering it.
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How to Completely Transform Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business
I’m putting together a Mastermind Program with commercial real estate brokerage professionals committed to earning an additional $250,000.00 or more within the next year.
If you’ve been a member of a Mastermind Program before you know how powerful this process is in having you transform your business. And if you’ve never been a member of a Mastermind Program, this is your chance to take your real estate business to an entirely new level.
My Mastermind Program will consist of 100% commercial real estate brokers, and we’ll meet three times within one year to share our secrets, strategies, game plans, and marketing ideas with everyone who’s a member of the Program.
If you’ve ever read the legendary success book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, this is the exact kind of Mastermind Program he recommends as an important component of achieving great success.
My Mastermind Program will have motivated, highly-driven commercial real estate brokers within it, and we’ll meet three times within one year for two days at a time in Southern California.
I’m a member of a Mastermind Program of high-level business owners and entrepreneurs myself, and three times a year I fly across the country to meet with this powerful group of individuals. And because of this my income has increased tremendously within the past two years.
If you’re committed to transforming your commercial real estate business and making an additional $250,000.00 or more in commissions within the next year, and you want to be considered for membership in this elite group of commercial real estate brokerage professionals, click here.
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Ensuring Your Commercial Brokerage Success in 2008
By Jim Gillespie | January 14, 2008
So the new year is now here. And hopefully you’ve set your goals for 2008 that are important for you to accomplish during the year. But what are you really going to do to ensure that you accomplish your goals for the year? One of the biggest mistakes that I see agents making is setting goals without designing a game plan to accomplish the goals. And even when they do design the game plan it can have flaws in it, leading to feelings of frustration and watching the year slip by while falling further and further behind in accomplishing these goals. So you’ll want to make sure you design a game plan of the activities you’ll need to do to accomplish the goals you’ve set for yourself in 2008.
In addition, and this is another important component that many agents neglect, is you’ll want to schedule times in your contact management software to check in and see how you’re doing with respect to accomplishing your goals in a timely manner. Many agents just set their goals for the year and then keep working throughout the year without really recognizing how they’re doing along the way. As long as there are still plenty of months left in the year there’s sometimes the feeling of “As long as I keep working hard, hopefully my goals will materialize along the way.” But working hard and doing the wrong activities while feeling busy along the way is not what will have an agent achieve their goals.
So I recommend that you schedule times to check in with yourself and see how you’re doing once a month or so throughout the year. Ask yourself questions like, “Am I focused on doing the activities that will have me achieve my goals for the year? Or am I off track from doing those activities right now?” (Hint–If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing activities not related to developing new business for yourself, you’re probably off track.)
And if you find yourself off track throughout the year–If you recognize you’re not doing the activities that will have you achieve your goals, or if you recognize you’ve fallen behind the pace for achieving your income goals for the year, go and get some help. Talk with your manager, get some input from another top-producing agent, or hire a real estate coach. Don’t be one of those agents who lets the year slide by and then in September says something like, “If I can just find, negotiate, and close both sides of a $50,000,000.00 transaction between now and December 31st, I’ll have met my income goal for the year.”
Define your goals, write down the activities you need to be doing throughout the year to accomplish these goals, and incorporate feedback into your system to make sure you’re checking in with yourself and observing how you’re doing along the way. Then take the appropriate corrective action that’s necessary.
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Join Me for My Live Teleseminar Wednesday Night:
“Planning Your Commercial Real Estate Excellence for 2008”
Click here for more information on this event. If you can’t join us for the live call on Wednesday night you can still receive the audio CDs, a written transcription, and highlights of the call all sent to you in the mail. Click on the link above for more information.
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Planning to Make 2008 a Great Year for You
By Jim Gillespie | December 10, 2007
When most of us get into commercial real estate brokerage, one of the big reasons we get into the business is because of the opportunity to make great money. And the reason we want to make great money oftentimes is because of the lifestyle we feel it will have us lead. But how often are we constantly living that lifestyle along the way?
I could talk to you right now about how to plan your year for brokerage excellence in 2008, but instead I’m going to talk with you about living the lifestyle you want to live for yourself in 2008. And besides, I’m going to have a teleseminar in January on “Planning Your Commercial Real Estate Excellence in 2008” anyway..:)
When planning for next year, what I recommend you do is make sure you create the lifestyle you want for yourself, and then plan your business around that lifestyle. I know this may sound different to you, but it’s a good way to ensure that you enjoy yourself thoroughly throughout the year.
When planning the year, plan your vacations first. Determine where you want to go and when, make the reservations, and get them all taken care of. Otherwise if you don’t do this in advance, next year may feel like a grind to you.
See if this sounds familiar:
You begin the year with the idea of creating some vacation time along the way, then you get caught up in working hard, then you find it more difficult to schedule your vacation time as the year moves along.
I once heard someone say that “Most of us go into business for ourselves because we can’t stand working for our boss, and then we end up working for a boss who’s crazy. The new boss makes us work much longer hours than we’ve ever worked before, and doesn’t allow us to take many vacations.”
With this in mind I have an aunt in Scotland who’s now 78 years old. She’s my father’s sister, my father being a man who was a Battle of Britain pilot who flew 101 combat missions in World War II. My father passed away in 1994, and my aunt hadn’t seen him since he moved to the United States in 1947…and she was just 18 years old at the time.
I’ve decided that 2008 is the year she’s going to meet my father’s granddaughter, and in looking at this photo of both me and my daughter Jamie (click here), I’m pretty sure she’s going to like her.
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Wednesday night I’ll Be Interviewing Top Commercial Broker
Bill Gladstone, SIOR, CCIM on a Live Teleconference Call
There may be no commercial broker in the business who’s better at marketing and promoting himself than Bill Gladstone. Bill’s promotional materials include customized newsletters, magazines, T-shirts, and bobblehead dolls made to look just like him. This Wednesday night I’ll be interviewing Bill on the subject of “Totally Eliminating Your Brokerage Competition,” and Bill will send these promotional materials in the mail to everyone on the call who wants them.
For more information on how you can join this live event, click here.
Topics: Uncategorized |
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Why Marketing is Your Most Important Brokerage Activity
By Jim Gillespie | November 20, 2007
Commercial real estate brokerage is an industry that lags behind many others in terms of effectively utilizing marketing approaches. Salespeople are often trained to pickup the phone and call prospects, or to maybe even walk an area and canvass businesses if they’re working with users. But that’s oftentimes about it in terms of utilizing effective approaches for developing new business. The problem with this, though, is that agents end up relying on just one way of developing their business, and this can oftentimes lead to problems.
While most agents believe in the idea of prospecting and feel they should be doing it, most agents end up dropping out their prospecting, and prospect only until they have enough leads to keep them busy. But in the end this will usually lead to inconsistent levels of production, and hanging on to the more marginal leads that just happen to come the agent’s way.
This is why reinventing yourself and marketing your brokerage business is very important, and probably the best way that I can illustrate this is through a true story involving one of my own one-on-one coaching clients…
Scott came to me 3-4 years ago as a brand new agent in the business and made his goal very clear to me. Within just months he wanted to create the impression in his prospects’ minds that he had already been a commercial broker in their area for 8-10 years. And when I began discussing with Scott the power of direct response marketing to his clients and prospects, Scott immediately recognized the value in this because he had already done this successfully in other businesses he had owned. So we began a direct response marketing campaign, and within his first few years in the business Scott had developed the campaign into pure art form. Working from a database of the 600 property owners he wanted to do business with, Scott began contacting each one of them 125 times throughout the year utilizing phone calls, mailing, broadcast faxes, and E-mail. And in just his fourth year in the business Scott sold more apartment buildings than any other broker in the state of Texas.
So if you’re relying right now on prospecting alone, and you’re not always getting your prospecting done, you’re costing yourself a lot of money. Begin doing direct response marketing and mail to your clients and prospects two or more times every month. Between this and doing your prospecting, you’ll be branding yourself in the minds of the people you want to work with, and they’ll begin thinking of working with you more frequently then they’ll begin thinking of working with your competitors.
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Tonight I’ll Be Interviewing Top Commercial Broker
Lawson Martin on a Live Teleconference Call
Tonight I’ll be interviewing Lawson Martin of Travers/Oncor International, and Lawson is one of the top tenant rep brokers in the business. His clients include AIG SunAmerica, Time Warner, Credit Suisse First Boston, EMI Music Publishing, Kaiser Permanente, Texaco, Unocal, and Warner Bros.
Lawson and I will be talking about what you need to know to keep your clients loyal to you throughout your commercial real estate brokerage career, and at the end of my interview with Lawson you can ask us any questions you want to about successfully building your commercial real estate business and taking it to the next level. For more information on this live event, click here.
Topics: Blogroll, Marketing, Prospecting |
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How to Generate More Business in a Changing Market
By Jim Gillespie | October 31, 2007
I’m hearing from agents all over the country now about how their markets are transitioning. While some markets still remain hot, many others have buyers who aren’t quite as excited as they were before about buying properties. And in general the investment markets seem to be getting hit harder than the user markets, as companies still want to own their own properties and aren’t buying them based upon cap rates, cash flow, and rates of return.
What seems to be happening is there are fewer sale transactions going on, but the same number of brokers are still chasing the existing ones. So in the aggregate there are less total commissions being paid, which means that you need to close a higher percentage of the business in your area now than you did just a few years ago to earn and get paid the same amount of income.
And with this in mind I can talk to you about marketing and positioning yourself as the best choice your clients and prospects could ever make in a broker, but very few brokers want to spend the time and money to do this. And this is sad because if they did they’d learn how to completely dominate their own territory for many years to come. So what’s left are the basics…what almost every broker feels they should be doing more of but really doesn’t want to…and that’s prospecting.
When transactions were coming much easier you could do less prospecting because so many people wanted to buy properties. But things have changed in many areas and you may be experiencing this exact change yourself in your own business right now. So if you want to be maximizing your income in this market now, you need to be prospecting a minimum of 10-12 hours every week. Yes I know you probably don’t want to do this amount of prospecting, but ask yourself “How much money would I make if I prospected 10-12 hours every week over the next 12 months?” And if you like your answer to this question, just get your prospecting done with no excuses.
An old friend of mine, Mike Monteleone, CCIM, told me he still does 10-12 hours of prospecting every week in his business. And he credits his prospecting as the main component of his averaging over $42 million a year in sales production throughout his 35-year real estate career. So if Mike can still get 10-12 hours of prospecting done every week, you can get it done, too. It all comes down to you being committed to doing what will maximize your income in your business, vs. you buying into your own excuses and feeling more comfortable in not doing your prospecting.
If you really knew how much money not doing your prospecting was costing you at all times, you’d just get it done with no excuses.
And when it comes to the subject of taking action, one of my friends forwarded me a video of a man who finally decided to do just this in his own life. I’ve been on the Internet for more than 13 years now, and I receive over 600 E-mails a day. But I don’t remember an E-mail that’s impacted me in quite the way that this one has. So I want you to see this video to show you what’s possible when you take the action you know you must in your life.
This four-minute video shows Paul, a cell phone salesman in Great Britain, appearing on a show that seems to be similar to American Idol. He doesn’t look like much, and you can see by the expressions on the judges’ faces that they don’t really expect much out of him. But when he opens his mouth and finally begins to sing, something very magical begins to happen…
To see this video, click here.
Topics: Blogroll, Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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Differentiating the Real Sellers from the Sellers Who Will Waste Your Time
By Jim Gillespie | October 15, 2007
So much has changed in so many real estate markets across the country. The residential markets have changed dramatically in many areas over the last 18 months, and some of the commercial markets are beginning to feel the transition now, too. In talking with many commercial brokers all across the country it seems that the investment markets are cooling off more than the user markets, as companies still want to buy and own their own buildings when they can do it for a fair price.
One of the problems for commercial brokers in this transitioning market, though, is identifying the sellers who are real and differentiating them from the sellers who will talk about selling their properties, but who will totally waste your time. These latter owners are the ones who will bring you great pain and suffering if you don’t learn how to identify them quickly when interacting with them.
When the market was hot in many areas owners could ask high prices and completely get away with it. The market would catch up with the high asking price within 1-4 months and eventually the property would sell at or near (and sometimes above) the listed price. But that’s not the case in many areas anymore. The problem is many brokers are still working with owners who are asking the high prices, but the market just won’t catch up with these high prices. So in many situations, unlike when the market was hot, the sellers who want higher than market prices for their properties today aren’t sellers that you can really do any business with, unless they have a true underlying reason to sell…
These true underlying reasons to sell include needing to cash out to get some money, desiring to trade into another property, wanting to trade into a property with less management, wanting to trade into a property that has more cash flow, wanting to trade into a property they feel is a better long-term investment, selling their property because of a divorce or a dissolution of partnership, selling their property because their business needs to relocate into another facility, or selling their property for estate planning purposes.
A seller who will only sell if they can get an unrealistic price in today’s market, and who has no additional underlying reason to sell their property, can be a major headache for you. So you’ll want to identify these people as soon as possible and avoid spending your time with them. Look instead to find sellers who have a genuine underlying reason to sell at today’s fair market value, and who feel that continuing to own their property one year from now is not an option.
So when you think you may be dealing with one of these unrealistic owners, ask them a question similar to the following one:
“How will you feel one year from now if no one has paid you the price you want for your property and you still own it?”
And if the owner responds to you with something like, “It doesn’t matter to me. I’m prepared to wait 5-10 years if I have to to get this price for my property,” you might want to turn and run in the opposite direction! The last person you want to be dealing with is an owner who isn’t motivated to sell their property, and who’s willing to wait a long time until they finally get their price. In this day and age in commercial real estate brokerage, determining who these people are and getting them out of your life as quickly as possible is one of the greatest skill sets you can learn.
With all of this in mind I’m just about to complete an E-book titled “Convincing Owners to List at Your Recommended Price,” which shows you how to overcome 14 different pricing objections that owners will throw at you when determining how to price their property. If you’d like to find out how you can receive one of these E-books for FREE from me click here.
Topics: Prospecting, Uncategorized |
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