To build your commercial real estate business as an office in your local town or city, and to gain the right market share for yourself, you are going to need a ‘Strategic Marketing Plan’. Before you create the plan, you will need a ‘Strategic Marketing Position’.
In this way will you make an impact on a consistent basis with the right prospects and players of the commercial property industry. Simply you want the market, the business owners, the property investors, and all the local tenants and buyers, to know that you are the best out there and can help them with their special property need.
So before you start to consider your marketing plan it is worthwhile considering what makes you better than the other agents and brokers in the area. You should have a real reason in being different in your property business, and your prospects must know you for that. This is both an issue for the office and for you as an individual. Everyone in your office should be pushing the same story when they talk to prospects.
Do not say that:
- You are the best in the area, and you know what you are doing
- You are honest with the client from the outset
- You communicate with the client every step of the way
- You have operated locally for 20 years and know everyone in town, etc
These generic statements are just that and are of no relevance to the people that you want to attract. Your reason for serving the property marketplace has to be significant and of benefit to the people that you deal with.
You can specialise in a single property type to achieve that relevance to the prospects that you want to attract. Consider statements like this:
- We specialise only in retail shopping centre leasing and sales so that the properties we handle can optimise their rental performance, sales turnover, and landlord return given the local demographic and community.
- We know the industrial leasing and sales market and have a database that captures all the businesses and properties locally for that very reason. This helps out property clients know what competition they are up against, and how they can adjust and target the real opportunity available out there.
- Office property sales and leasing is our specialty because we have tracked the majority of local major buildings and tenants for some years now, and because of that we know who the major players are, and when they will need to relocate or dispose of critical assets.
This valued approach gives the client or prospect real comfort in knowing that you have something they can use. If you run a typical commercial real estate office, your major services to the clients you serve could be repackaged and focused as:
- Professional advisory services in the strategy behind leasing, selling, and managing commercial property in the local business community. You incorporate the trends and sentiment of the local business community plus the decisions and directions of planning authorities so that your clients make the right property decisions based on facts.
- Target marketing of commercial properties for sale, and lease, using special marketing packages that offer the investment client real impact beyond the standard ‘advertise and wait’ approach that many other agents or brokers use.
- Property management services offering significant income and expenditure solutions that package and target the asset to the client’s investment cycle of property holding and expected returns.
This rebranding approach is like a business plan in one or two sentences. You give your office a reason to serve the local property investors and those landlords that need your help. When you and your staff start to live and work within the ‘brand’, the market starts to see that you are really different and better than the rest.