Top Commercial Real Estate Broker Issues
Thanks to all of you who reached out and shared your frustrations with in your business. You’re not alone. I received a lot of questions and selected the top 4 to answer below.
1. Question 1: How can I protect my commissions?
Get it in writing. You must remember that you are the first investor in every relationship you take on. If you aren’t getting it in writing, you have yourself to blame.
Imagine one of your investors decides to purchase a building. Before the preparation and acceptance of a letter of intent, he spends 30-60 days completing all of his due diligence at his sole cost. During which time, another investor swoops in and places the property under agreement. Your investor had no control and wasted time, money and energy working the investment. What a loss.
Your business is no different. Before you start spending time and money working for anyone, make sure they are signed up with you first. If they refuse, that should be telling.
2. Question 2: I’m tired of prospects expecting me to do everything for free with nothing in return. What should I do?
This is a great question. In a recent conversation with one of our clients, I mentioned that many prospects treat real estate brokers like the village bicycle. He chimed in by saying, “more like the village idiot.”
Unfortunately, we’re all guilty of training the market to believe that we are free, low cost providers of information, leads, and opportunities with no commitment on the other end. You must spend time qualifying your prospects to make sure they are serious about transacting and if they’re not, move on. They’re a bad investment.
Check to make sure you know the following:
What are their pains?
Are there 3-5 motivations that make sense to you?
How much are they looking to spend to solve the problem?
Who are all of the decision makers and have they been included in your conversations?
3. Question 3: I want access to better deals and more leads. Any suggestions?
Yes. It’s all about marketing yourself. You must identify your target list and start communicating with them in a new and meaningful way both offline and online.
You should also try to meet with the people who are active in the deal space that you’re evaluating because person to person meetings accelerate your information gathering and give you access to more openings, which become opportunities for you.
4. Bonus Question 4: Dealing with decision making difficulties.
One email came in that said:
“My biggest frustration is dealing with large corporations that have over burdened executives (I have a Walmart deal falling apart because our lease comments are too detailed and will take too long for them to work through), tedious approval processes (it literally take 3 separate committee meetings with hours of preparation over a 6 week period to get a CVS deal approved), departments working against each other to cover themselves (ie. construction hedging on costs with skinny deals that results in unnecessary contract termination), C-suite executives having knee-jerk reactions to things like stock market swings (I literally had a lease that was executed waiting for Fedex pick up that was yanked from the mail room because the Dow dipped a few percent one day.), etc., etc., etc.
Great points. What you’re dealing with is a cast of characters problem. Just as a play has a group of characters who all interact with one another to pull off a production, so does a sale. There is rarely, if ever, one decision maker that you’ll be working with, particularly in large organizations where CYA is a way of life.
A few tricks for dealing with decision making amongst a large cast of characters are:
1. Get the names and contact information of every single person who will be signing off on the deal. Try to meet with all of them and if possible, do it in person.
2. Develop an internal advocate. What this means is that you need an insider to carry to the deal forward at times when you are excluded from meetings regarding your deal. Your job is to coach this person on how to handle objections, roadblocks, and problems.
3. Perfect your post-sell. Make sure your lease isn’t yanked from the mail room after the deal’s been signed by asking questions ahead of time about potential pitfalls that could sour the deal decision after it’s been made. Try asking, “Is there any reason why, tomorrow, you might call me to tell me the deal is off?”
When someone answers, “No”, they’re much less likely to go back on their word.
To set up a free 30 minute, confidential coaching session with Jeremy, send a message to Jeremy@MansardCre.com.