WAYS TO GENERATE LEADS ON COMMERCIAL PROPERTY OWNER’S INFORMATION TO MAKE AN OFFER

A lead, in its more basic form, is someone who shows an interest in your real estate business in some way. Real estate leads can come from several different channels, including social media, direct mail, traditional advertising, and referrals. The primary goal of real estate lead generation is to turn leads into prospects, then leads into clients, and clients into closed clients. It’s all about getting people interested in your product or service with the intent of developing a sales pipeline. 

Lead generation is a marketing term that describes the process of attracting prospective clients and converting them into someone interested in your products or services. Finding commercial real estate leads means understanding how to position your lead magnets and what tools to use. In the commercial real estate business, a lead is a person interested in using your services to rent, buy, lease, or sell their commercial property. 

When finding out how to generate commercial real estate leads, it’s best to study content marketing statistics to get a better understanding of how to market your business and generate more leads. Not only is it a key component of the entire buying and selling process, but it also plays a crucial role in setting up a real estate business for long-term success. Without regular infusions of new leads, prospects, clients, and close clients, you’ll have a much harder time building a successful commercial real estate business (and making sure it continues to thrive for years to come).

Tenants, investors, and buyers spend more time online than ever researching commercial real estate deals and opportunities, so having a commercial real estate marketing strategy to attract attention and gain trust is paramount to convincing leads to doing business with you.

You need a plan in place to build lists from existing databases, leverage real estate data sources, and optimize your website to capture visitors as leads. Commercial prospecting relies not only on the quality of your marketing materials but on your ability to provide valuable information to visitors on your website. Quality matters, but volume is also necessary to keep your pipeline full of warm leads you can nurture and close.

WAYS TO GENERATE LEADS ON COMMERCIAL PROPERTY 

Finding people who are looking to buy commercial real estate generally means having a good understanding of how to position your real estate lead magnets. There are various ways of generating leads on commercial properties, and they are:

• Use Commercial Real Estate Data Platforms to Find Leads

To be successful in real estate lead generation, the first step is to gather information, which you can do by leveraging commercial real estate data platforms. These are platforms that help agents generate commercial real estate leads by showing contact information, available properties, listing agents, and other property details.

Examples of top commercial real estate database providers include:

• Reonomy
• ProspectNow
• CoStar
• LoopNet

Each of these platforms works differently. As you check out various commercial real estate databases, you’ll see that some are marketplaces for buyers and sellers, and some are designed to help professionals find leads. Make sure you understand the purpose of each database and choose the right one based on your most important needs.

For example, Reonomy uses predictive intelligence to help you identify leads who are likely to take action, while ProspectNow allows you to get leads and contacts, and nurture them with built-in customer relationship management (CRM) software. Once you familiarize yourself with all of the researchable commercial real estate data, you’ll be more aware of the process and the problems potential clients face. You’ll also be able to research properties more thoroughly.

• Attract Leads With a Custom Website & Landing Pages

Landing pages optimize your website for better real estate lead generation. Create a custom landing page on your website for all commercial real estate leads, or create multiple landing pages for leads who land on your website from different sources, or different types of leads.

You can then add a lead magnet to pull your website visitors into your funnels, such as a free comparative market analysis report or a downloadable e-book on a topic valuable to your ideal client types. Once prospects opt-in by filling out a form on your landing page, you can start to build the relationship through nurturing tactics and increase your chances of converting them into a client.

For instance, commercial real estate agents can create landing pages for specific marketing efforts, like individual properties or niches. If you work with restaurants, retail, and industrial clients, you can create an individual landing page for each audience to showcase your expertise.

• Build a List from an Existing Commercial Real Estate Database

Mining your existing contact list to generate leads is an excellent place to start and try to segment your contacts based on interest, profile type, and level of prior activity. Even contacts that have been inactive for several years may prove to be potential opportunities as their needs may have changed alongside what you can offer. Reach out via email, phone, or LinkedIn to re-engage these older contacts.

• Market to Niche Commercial Real Estate Client Types

Although commercial real estate is in itself a real estate niche, it’s still fairly general. For example, buying and selling restaurant space requires a much different type of understanding and connection than corporate office space. Hyper-focusing your marketing and advertising efforts on just one type of commercial real estate client type could bring you more success. It allows you to put more resources and time to work to generate specific types of leads instead of spreading them out too thin.

Getting extremely specific about your target audience can also help you get the best results from the tools and strategies you use to generate commercial real estate leads. For example, instead of sending generic marketing mailers, send attention-getting content specific to your ideal client type’s questions and problems.

ProspectsPLUS! has a template library with thousands of unique, real estate-related topics and designs, this makes it easy for you to create a mailer that speaks to the exact needs and interests of your prospect. Potential clients will be more likely to notice content-targeted mailers, reach out to you for more information, or hang on to them for future reference.

• Network on Social Media

Social media is a highly effective method of reaching potential leads and clientele. Each platform, however, offers different advantages and disadvantages—knowing how to get the most out of these is important. What is the best time to post on social media? What should I post on which platform? Who do I connect with?

• LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is a great platform for reaching professionals interested in commercial real estate. You can use this platform to sell or market real estate or get leads on a consistent basis. It’s also great for maintaining or sourcing professional blogs about the industry as a whole. You’re likely to find a lot of business-related leads on this platform, it’s a great place to reach companies and individuals alike.

• Facebook

Facebook is one of the more user-friendly data sources for a real estate broker, and it’s an ideal platform for marketing your real estate and sourcing leads. It’s simple to use and offers a reliable way to reach a wide audience, allowing you to find leads from all walks of life. You can also reach a wider demographic target through Facebook, quickly and easily reaching many people. Use the platform’s stylish features to help create presentable ads that can be used to directly market listings and garner leads or sales, as well as receive local business news.

• Twitter

Twitter is a good place to reach out to local organizations and businesses, as well as to generate leads and follow local business news. You can use it to help celebrate sales (along with Facebook and LinkedIn) or reach out to fellow professionals.

• YouTube

YouTube is a great tool to use for generating leads. This platform is the second-largest search engine and the third-most visited website in the world. YouTube is a great platform for reaching and showing your network commercial real estate services that you offer via videos or vlogs. As part of a YouTube video action campaign, you can attach a form to generate leads for your business. Lead forms can help you find and engage interested users, create remarketing lists, and drive sales and conversions for your products or services. 

• Provide Valuable Content on a Website or Blog

Offering your services, advice, or listings through a lead magnet is a good idea. Gated content is a digital document that viewers can only access after exchanging their information. It offers contact details for a fee. It’s a great way to generate leads for your business and offer valuable content for a reasonable tradeoff.

Provide content that is not necessarily directly connected to real estate but also to industries that tenants and commercial building owners rely on, such as local and national retailers, business lawyers, or doctors. Be sure to link your content through more than just commercial real estate platforms. Also, content like podcasts, research, and insights on commercial real estate, etc.

• Be Active in the Community & With Local Businesses

The best way to consistently scale your business and income as a commercial real estate agent is to establish your authority. When you’re known as the go-to source for commercial real estate, you won’t have to spend nearly as much time, money, and effort generating commercial real estate leads.

In order to earn this type of authority, you’ll need to make connections and provide value to potential clients as well as other commercial real estate professionals. This could be done at in-person events, by helping acquaintances gather information, or by presenting or hosting training seminars.

Build your network by attending events and joining groups for local businesses. For example, you can find groups with potential commercial real estate clients by searching for “local business groups” or “small business groups” along with towns and cities in your area. You can also use Meetup.com to find groups of business owners near you. Joining Meetup will provide opportunities to get together with smaller groups, and classes, or attend events tailored to your target audience and community.

In addition, join groups on LinkedIn. These could be groups of other like-minded real estate pros or groups made up of local real estate investors, restaurateurs, retailers, and so on. Connect and network with local business owners who are interested in leasing or purchasing commercial properties now or who may be down the road. These types of networking activities provide contacts for direct lead generation as well as professional referral networks to gain clients.

• Join Commercial Real Estate Associations & Teams

Professionals in all industries should be constantly seeking to learn more and improve their craft. Joining an association is a simple way to connect with other people in your field. Creating these connections is essentially the equivalent of growing your sphere of influence (SOI), and opens up opportunities for referral lead generation.

Here are a few of the top commercial real estate associations:

• The Commercial Real Estate Development Association (NAIOP) 
• Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW)
• Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA)
• Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM Institute)
• Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR)
• International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)

Another way to grow your skills is by joining a real estate team that specializes in commercial real estate. Like an association, this puts you in contact with like-minded professionals, and you’ll also get the opportunity to learn from experienced brokers and agents. Strategic partnerships with other commercial agents in or outside of your team allow you to build a network where leads can be shared.

• Nurture Prospects More Effectively With a CRM

As your business and the number of contacts in your sales pipeline grow, you will need effective tools for maintaining consistent communication with prospects and clients. Using CRM software provides numerous benefits for commercial real estate agents, including the ability to stay on top of mind with current and past clients, generate leads, and convert new leads into clients. 

CRMs can organize your leads and clients into different pipelines in order to optimize your communication tactics. For instance, segment your clientele into purchased leads, and niche audiences like buyers, sellers, and past clients. Utilize your CRM to automate audience-specific text and email campaigns to engage each of these client types separately.

Many of the best CRMs also enable you to optimize your marketing and advertising and build brand awareness through direct mail, social media, websites, and landing pages. Many even have premade marketing templates that can be customized to fit your style and target your real estate niche. In addition to communicating with clients, CRMs provide reports that help you better understand your financial picture and return on investment (ROI). This in turn enables you to allocate funds into and prioritize the lead strategies that generate revenue.

• Exhibiting and Participating in Conferences and Events

Exhibiting at national conferences and local commercial real estate events exposes you to a large audience of potential prospects, opening up new networking and partnership opportunities, along with direct lead generation opportunities. Prior to the event, you can research who will be participating and set up as many meetings as possible to optimize your time while you’re in town.

For events at which you cannot exhibit, attending and networking offer similar benefits. Local small business meetups, real estate seminars, or local conferences are all ideal locations to engage with prospective leads and partners as you build your personal and professional network.

CONCLUSION

Commercial real estate is a challenging market to break into. You need to know how to generate commercial real estate leads and how to market them correctly. You’ll also need to have good networking ability and be creative about how your network and source potential clients.

By growing your network, purchasing lead data, leveraging online marketing tools, generating and nurturing leads with a CRM, and more, you will put yourself in the best position to generate commercial real estate leads both organically and through paid methods. You should employ multiple lead generation techniques simultaneously to produce effective results and maximize your efforts.

 

As informed investors we should understand the risks associated with real estate investing and that there is no guarantee. Please do your due diligence.