In commercial real estate brokerage and agency you need a prospecting plan and some rules to stick to. It is far too easy to be distracted and diverted in your daily business efforts. Discipline is required to break through the prospecting barrier.

If you do not have a plan of this type, you simply run out of listing leads and business opportunities. It takes about 3 months to grow your market share and a similar amount of time to lose it. The prospecting plan helps you keep your career and focus under control.

So what stops an agent or broker from prospecting? Here are some of the regular problems:

• Demanding clients that want to see you
• Unnecessary meetings in the office
• Reports and paperwork
• No research and planning made for people to call or contact
• Lack of organisation
• No time set aside in a diary
• Too many open listings that waste your time
• Inbound enquiries from advertising and marketing

I know that some of these things can be quite important, but that being said, you can manage your time and your way through the problems. Prospecting should be the number one event in your day regardless of anything else. That is how you build market share.

Here are some rules that work well for top commercial real estate brokers in prospecting:

1. When you are out and about in your territory or sales patch, make note of any businesses or properties that have opportunity and attraction. They can go into your ‘research later’ list.
2. From any positive relationship and client contact you can find referral opportunities. Use the right questions at the right time with your clients to find others to talk to.
3. All of your listings will give you the chance to talk to local property owners and business leaders. Take a ‘property update’ flyer with you when you are out in the market. Drop it into adjacent businesses that are near to your listings.
4. Use a combination of cold calling and direct contact to reach new people. You can do the cold calling before you go anywhere else at the start of the day. The direct contact can happen when you are in your sales area or territory.
5. Some local listings will be ‘open’ and listed with many agents. You can attempt to convert these listings to ‘exclusive’ over time. Most property owners do not like to be an experiment in marketing. Time is money to them (and so it should be).
6. Every property that you take exclusively to the market should be supported by vendor paid marketing funds. Ensure that you make every marketing campaign a strong and successful process. That will help you win other listings.
7. Get plenty of signboards into your territory. They will produce more personal branding for you.

To prospect successfully in commercial real estate, you need that system that you can understand and work to great success. That is how top agents do it. Time and specific effort will then take you up in the market ‘leader board’.