How To Become A Real Estate Shark

In my last post on Donald Trump’s Recession Strategies, I mentioned that asking quality, empowering questions have led to his undeniable success.  So the questions that begs an answer is this:

What is the most powerful question you could ask to push your business to the next level?

Quality Question?

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, one quality question you could ask is this:

How can I become the real estate shark in my own pond?

I can just see the look of confusion on your face… trying to cope with the mental flash-backs of various gory, blood-filled scenes of the movie Jaws (or Jaws II, or Jaws III)…

And that’s exactly the reason I picked a shark as a metaphor!

Well, besides the fact that the image of a shark usually instills a lot fear in most people (definitely a desired outcome when it comes to your competitors), sharks have a number of great qualities that have helped them thrive for millions of years as other species went extinct:

• Sharks are at the pinnacle of the aquatic food chain
• Sharks have no natural enemies
• Sharks have a voracious appetite
• Sharks have a magnificent sense of “smell”
• Sharks are always moving, swimming (a still shark is a dead shark)
• Sharks are perpetual survivors
• Sharks usually attack without warning
• Sharks never take “no” for an answer!
• Sharks are fast! Faster than most fish and mammals in the ocean.

I bet you never thought sharks could be such good role models, did you?

Being a Real Estate Shark

Carrying our analogy of a shark a bit further, you can see that to be a real estate shark, you must not only have the voracious appetite for success, but you must also have the keen sense for detecting opportunities from a mile away.

You must never stop moving, and never take “no” for an answer… and most importantly:

You must be FAST!

In the business of real estate, it’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow!

So what does it take for you to outpace your competition?

To answer that question, let’s check with our trusty shark metaphor…

A fast shark isn’t necessarily the one that swims the fastest… As I mentioned before, sharks are swimming all the time.

What makes a shark fast is its ability to react quickly to its environment; for example, when faced with an opportunity to make a meal out of an unsuspecting prey.

And in order to accomplish that, sharks have developed:

• A series of sensory systems that alert them to the presence of these opportunities,
• The environmental awareness to scope out the opportunity and make their move in an instant.
• The instinct to fully commit to a prey once they’ve begun their move (once a shark bites, it’s not going to take “no” for an answer!).

Can you see the parallels to commercial real estate brokerage here?

Commercial Real Estate Sensory Systems

Simply stated, Sensory Systems are the engines that power the speed of your commercial real estate brokerage business.

They fall under the Systems category of the Success Pyramid I wrote about in my earlier posts.

They usually include one or more of:

• Efficient business processes that are optimized for you, their user - meaning they produce maximum results with minimum efforts, while leveraging your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses.
• An operational “dashboard” that gives you an intelligent, complete, birds-eye view of every significant part of your business (like your sales funnel).
• A set of meaningful metrics you can use in conjunction with your other systems to determine how well you are doing in relations to your goals, industry standards, and your own personal performance baselines.
• An automated, flexible process for forecasting problem areas in anything we mentioned above. For example, this forecasting process would tell you if the number of cold calls you make each week is not going to result in the number of deals in escrow you’re looking for.

Which of these systems do you have in place today?  (Leave me a comment on the blog and let me know)

Market Awareness

This is exactly what you think it is…  it’s your ability to keep current with what is happening in your market (and in the broader business environment).

Developing market awareness requires you to:

• Be intimately familiar with the specific markets where your commercial properties are located, as well as those markets where your clients operate.
• Stay current with significant commercial real estate news and commentary (see Weekly CRE Essentials for an example)
• Keep track of general business news that impact your ability to conduct business in your target markets.
• Develop the mental foresight to spot trends and forecast possible market events.

There are many sources for general and commercial real estate news and market trends analysis.  Here are a few example:

• RCA Commercial Real Estate Sales Trends & Market Research
• Commercial Property News (CPN)
• Real Estate News Television
• Globe Street
• STDB Online
• CoStar
• The Wall Street Journal

Here’s The Catch

The problem with having so many different sources is that keeping up with all the news can be a full-time job in itself.

This information overload is even worse when you consider that this list doesn’t even include many of the sources for editorial commentary and analysis of the news.

Personally, I was having a really tough time developing this sort of market awareness myself.

And that’s exactly why we created the Weekly CRE Essentials newsletter… To scan dozens of different news and commentary sources and highlight only the most significant news about the commercial real estate industry that you must be aware of each week - and deliver it to your mailbox every weekend.

Unlike most other newsletter, this one doesn’t include news about specific markets (you can get that very easily from many local resources), or broad general business news (that’s what the Wall Street Journal is for).

It does focus on significant news and commentary, on a national scale, that impact commercial real estate and your ability to conduct business as a broker.

So be sure to subscribe to it… and post a comment here and let me know what you think of it.  I love getting feedback!

Total Commitment

I’ve written about his topic in a previous post (see Failing As A Commercial Real Estate Broker), so I won’t repeat myself here.

But let me say that all the principles I mentioned in that post apply to individual deals and individual clients as well.

Total commitment to commercial real estate brokerage is total commitment to each and every deal, and most importantly, each and every client.

If you haven’t read that post, or if you’re not fully and completely committing yourself to commercial real estate brokerage, then you are likely to stay a hatchling shark forever.

All You Can Eat

In my next post, I’ll share with you one of the most-overlooked and least-understood principles of successful brokerage.

Combine what you’ve learned here with what I’ll share with you in my next post, and you’ll be virtually unstoppable!

A shark with an all-you-can-eat pass…

Imagine that!