Massimo Group client, Massey Knakal Realty Services, recently announced a new initiative called the Knakal News Network (KNN). KNN is hosted by Massey Knakal Chairman, Bob Knakal.

Ranked by CoStar as the #1 New York Brokerage firm based on the number of investment properties sold for each of the last twelve years, Massey Knakal is presenting to all participants in the commercial real estate market Mr. Knakal’s views, perspectives, and insights via weekly video presentations. These video clips will delve deeply into a new topic each week to convey the most recent news and trends.

Mr. Knakal has been the chairman of Massey Knakal since founding the firm with Paul Massey in 1988.

Although these videos are centered around the New York metropolitan area, the strategies and tactics shared by Mr. Knakal are applicable to any investment broker in any market.

To view this latest video, please click on the image above.

In baseball, the time between pitches seems like hours.  In fact, in less than one minute the pitcher and catcher have scanned the field, mentally reviewed their notes on the current hitter, and the potential next hitter, communicated on a strategy to approach all these elements, and had little if any verbal exchange!  That’s quite impressive if you think about it.  Heck that’s more effort than most brokers put into their pitches for listings.

There are two keys to winning listings — convincing the prospect to list their property and then convincing them to list with you.  Both of these processes require different skills and a different set of pitches. But before you start pitching, you have to make a very important decision: whether or not you want to list the property.  Yes, most brokers quickly confirm they do, but several ultimately wish they didn’t.

You win listings by sharing with/convincing the client it is better to list than not to list and that it is better to list with you than with anyone else. While it’s possible to convince prospects of your skillset through rhetoric, it’s a lot easier to do it when you can point to specific listings that you have successfully closed. However, before you rush to list a property, determine if it is one that you can put in your “win” column.  If it is not clear, you should have a strategy as to why you would take an assignment when you feel you very well may fail.  Then determine how your pitch will need to be adjusted.

Some prospects understand the value of giving you a listing, but many do not. If you are dealing with a prospect that doesn’t get it, you will need to share some of the benefits of listing with them. There are the very basic ones:

• When you list with me, I can execute a full marketing program consisting of….
• I can tap into a database of ___ buyers sand ___ cooperating brokers.
• As your representative, I will negotiate on your behalf, rather than on the buyer’s behalf.

There are more articulate ways to express the value of representation, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Once you have shared with the seller the benefits of listing their property, you then need to convince him or her to list with you instead of another competing broker. To win the business, ask yourself this question: What can I offer that the seller needs that no other broker can and how can I demonstrate this? Figuring out your unique value proposition and then articulating it is the key to successfully beating your competition to gain the prospect’s business.

New, quality listings are great for your business. Not only do they lead to paychecks, but they also increase your profile in the market and give you a shot at additional buy-side business both on the listing and by selling other properties to buyers that don’t buy the listed one. With this in mind, it is well worth the effort to both refine and practice your skills at pitching the value of the exclusive and your unique client focused value proposition.  Unlike baseball, striking out when you pitch is not a statistic you should be proud of.

Your Pipeline Is Your Bloodline.

Being a commercial real estate brokerage professional means that you get pulled in many different directions all at once. To be great at your business, you have to not just handle but master all of these things. But, ultimately, there is only one thing that matters in your business.

Your pipeline.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you don’t need to have a good reputation. I’m not denigrating the importance of marketing knowledge. I assure you that you need to have solid relationships with prospects, clients and third-parties. I also recommend that you earn as much money as possible! When you really look at your business, though, none of those things really matter if you lack a healthy pipeline.

Pipelines are more complicated than most commercial brokers realize. Your list of under contract deals isn’t your pipeline. It’s your list of deals under contract. It is a part of your pipeline, and it is the part that you may feel most acutely, but it’s not the most important part. After all, once a deal closes, it goes off of your pipeline and, in many cases, that client goes dormant for a while.

The key to your pipeline is to keep filling it up with new opportunities. This might sound obvious, but many commercial real estate agents never think about the top part of their pipelines. The meetings, proposals, offers and listings that you take get filtered out and make up the bottom lines of your pipeline. As long as you keep creating opportunities for yourself, your pipeline will continue to stay flush and your business will keep creating paychecks for you and your family.

Think of your pipeline the way that you think of your circulatory system. You’re healthy because your heart pumps freshly oxygenated blood throughout your body, nourishing every part of it. Your business is the same. For it to be healthy, you need to always have fresh opportunities coming into it. In other words, your pipeline is your bloodline.

One of the best ways to retain your brokers is to periodically hand them good leads. At the same time, you also need to ensure that your office has a strong name in the market. This increases your agents’ credibility and makes it easier for them to close clients for business.

Sample Marketing Tips

While there are a lot of ways to build a market presence, doing it for free will really boost your bottom line. At the Massimo Group, we implement our “Presence Pyramid” of Personal, Physical and Digital components.

Every time that your office signs a lease, sells a building or lands a management contract, send out a press release. You’d be amazed how many of them get picked up by the local real estate and business papers. This strategy works even better if you already have a face-to-face relationship with the real estate reporters in your community.

Building a social network presence is another way to get your message out to hundreds or thousands of people at little or no cost. If you are with a national firm, your company is doing it and at least some of your agents are doing it but are you? Creating a blog, maintaining a Facebook page for your office and tweeting about the market are all excellent ways to keep your office on the top of your prospects’ minds.

Generating Leads and Doing Business

One of the easiest ways to help your brokers do more business is to go on meetings with them. It sends a strong message to clients that the firm cares about their business and it also gives you an opportunity to ensure that your marketing message is getting communicated to clients. It is likely that some of your more senior brokers will be resistant to this in the beginning, but if they see you helping less senior agent earn business, their attitudes will likely change.

Another excellent way to generate leads for your agents is to stay in touch with former clients. Whether you signed a lease with them, sold a property for them or just did a BOV or proposal, add them to your email list and social networking feeds. You can even check in with them periodically. This tool is especially powerful if the agent that originally did business with them leaves your office—you can then hand the client off to another agent.

We’re past the halfway point of talking about management challenges. Next time, we’ll talk about the operational challenges that you face.

Once you’ve built a great team, you’re going to need to keep them great. As you know, managing your team and helping them improve their performance is the biggest challenge in brokerage management. Here are four tips that I know to work from my experience as a broker, manager and as a coach to brokers and managers:

Avoid “One Size Fits All” Management

Many managers have one style which they apply to every one of their brokers. Then they wonder why people in their office are unhappy, unmotivated and likely to quit at any time. Are you the same person as your sister, your best friend or your second-most-successful broker?  Of  course not.

Different brokers have different motivations and respond to different types of management. Some like rewards, while others are motivated by the fear of sanctions. Others need a little bit of micromanagement to help keep them on track while others work best when left alone.

Get to know how your brokers want to be managed and tailor your style to each of them. Using a tailored style will help you to get better performance from them while also making them feel better about their relationship with you.  Refer back to Challenge #1 in this series regarding screening and assessment tools.  These are great products for understanding how to understand the individual motivations of each team member.

Be Ethical

You might think that this is obvious, but it isn’t. Most managers would never do anything egregiously unethical, but every manager has been confronted with issues that fall in an ethical grey zone. When you are in this situation, bear in mind that what you do will end up being telegraphed to your entire office. Once you bend your ethical standards, you will begin lose the moral authority to impose those standards on your office as a whole.

Be Consistent

Being consistent is more nuanced than it might seem. Consistency isn’t about treating every agent and every situation exactly the same way. Instead, it’s about having a system and set of standards that you apply evenly. Agents shouldn’t be surprised by your answer when they come to you for a decision or with a request, and they should get the same result as other agents in their situation.

Be Wrong

It’s okay to be wrong. The most important thing is to own it and move on. Saying such things as “Remember when I told you X yesterday? I was gave you bad information, and I apologize. Here’s the right answer…” will let agents know that you are human, just like them. When you also fix your mistakes you reinforce your quality standards.

Have Some Fun

We work in a demanding and intense business that has been through an uncommonly challenging few years. While you do not want to be the lead joker in your office, a bit of (appropriate) levity and fun can go a long way to improve your office’s esprit de corps.

Now that you’ve got a handle on how to keep a handle on your team, you’re ready for our next post about the third management challenge – developing business.

If you cannot grow your commercial real estate brokerage, it will die. After all, no matter how good you are at retaining your existing brokers, you are going to lose some. Some will retire, some will move and others will just decide to do something else. If you have a good recruiting program, it will do more than just replace lost personnel, though. It will bring new talent into your office while also letting your existing brokers see how many people think working with you is a good idea. Done right, recruiting can really step up your morale.

A good recruiting program will bring in three different types of candidates: new brokers, mid-range brokers and “whales.” You will need to take different approaches towards recruiting each of these pools, and you need to bring all of them in.

New Brokers

Most new brokers will be recent college graduates. They are energetic, hardworking and, thanks to the proliferation of collegiate real estate programs, might be the most technically skilled people in your office.  Get to know the people who run the Real Estate and Business programs at your local colleges and recruit from their pool. While you are doing this, web ads at the local college and at major job posting boards will also bring new candidates to you.

New brokers are typically worried about one thing: can they succeed? To successfully recruit them, be ready to explain how you will be able to get them trained and supported for success. Most managers in your position either have a training program or have teams of brokers that are looking to grow and to take on training duties.

Furthermore, you need to confirm, and then reconfirm that these recruits have the ability to support themselves, without compensation for up to six months, and more reasonably one year.  You must also reiterate your expectations and ideally team them up with a mentor so they can learn, while making limited mistakes.

Midrange Brokers

Midrange associates will usually come from your competitors or from other industries. They should have some baseline knowledge of how to do the business and are just looking for a better place to do it. The best way to find these candidates is to stay involved in the brokerage community. Go to events, speak on panels, get quoted in the local media and generally make sure that they know who you are. If you really want to get aggressive, pop them a friendly email or call every time that they close a deal or a lease.

Another absolute is your current associates’ ability to articulate your company’s value proposition.  It is one thing for them to share with recruits that you have a “great place to work”, but what you really want is your team to do is understand why others may be looking to make a change and communicate with them why your firm is the best platform for them to succeed.

Whales

You know who the largest and most active brokers in your market are. Imagine if one of them joined your team. You’d get a big revenue boost while you send a strong message to every other broker that your office is THE place to be. Big prizes take big efforts.

While everything that you do to attract midrange brokers is an important part of attracting whales, bringing in a major player will require you to go much further. Recruiting major brokers starts with getting to know them. If you can build a relationship with them and gradually demonstrate that you can add value to them, they will let you know when they are ready to make a move. This process can take years to unfold, but brings major benefits.

I watch brokerage owners simply assume they cannot land the whale.  Similar to associates assuming they can’t get bigger listings.  This is a huge mistake.  Whether it be equity, team support, a new opportunity or simply a change, whales have pains and gains that you can leverage.

Essential Point

Regardless of the level of broker you are targeting to recruit, you must have a recruiting process.  Going with your gut is simply no better than winging it.  We screen every coaching candidate, with online assessment tools that define their natural behaviors.  As do our owner clients with their associate / broker candidates.  Your process should have several steps, from team interviews to background checks to competency validation.  Recruiting a friend or someone who is “a nice guy” is nothing more than applying a “mirror test” and hoping they have a breath.  This is no way to build your practice.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the second challenge in brokerage management – managing the brokers.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with countless owners and managers of commercial real estate brokerage firms. As a part of helping them discover ways to build their success, by helping their agents grow their businesses, I have identified five key challenges brokerage owners and managers regularly face:

1. Recruiting Challenges. Brokerage owners and managers know the lifeblood of their business is their agent pool. Growing that pool is a challenging and time consuming process which requires both a diverse skill set as well as a clear strategy. Bringing in a fresh college graduate is a very different process from recruiting a disgruntled top producer from a competing firm. Each of these “elevator assets” need to be handled with care.

2. Brokerage Staff Challenges. Every broker is an individual, and they all need different things at different times from their manager. The best commercial real estate managers are trainers, mentors, coaches, business strategists, and, at times, psychoanalysts.  An old colleague of mine, John McDermott, once accurately summarized that a broker only wants their manager’s attention for one or two reasons; to bitch or to boast.    Likewise the manager has to deal with the administrative and support staff and ensures they are not only getting the job done, but getting the respect they deserve.

3. Business Development & Marketing Challenges. In addition to growing and managing a brokerage team, owners and managers of commercial real estate firms play a role in keeping their team busy. They have to wear two hats to do it. Sometimes, managers must oversee a marketing strategy that builds brand equity and opens doors for brokers to enter. At other times, brokerage managers must go into the field and both close sales with their brokers and generate live leads for them.

4. Operational Challenges. In addition to managing the team and the brand, leaders of commercial brokerages have to keep the lights on, satisfy the requirements of state licensing agencies and otherwise keep the office running. Along with these nuts and bolts issues, managers who want to succeed also need to collect and analyze performance data to understand where they are succeeding and where they need to work harder.

5. Challenges Getting to the Next Stage. The best managers that I work with also keep an eye on big-picture strategic considerations regarding the future of their firms. For example, they look for other brokerages in their market or in complementary markets that they should acquire or merge with. They also build a personal strategy for how they will relate to the brokerage in the future and for how their company will continue after them. Unfortunately, many managers are so overwhelmed by the other four challenges that they fail to give these crucial issues enough consideration.

Every one of these challenges may seem daunting, but you can become a master of all of them. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll have more to say about each of them and about how to become a better commercial real estate brokerage owner or manager.

The Massimo Group, the nation’s premier commercial real estate coaching and consulting organization is once again seeking full-time and part time commercial real estate coaches for its growing practice.  The Massimo Group is proud to include every major commercial real estate brokerage firm and/or its individual brokers as clients, along with scores of regional and local firms.

The position will be responsible for delivering the Massimo Group’s proprietary coaching systems, as well as supporting several of the Massimo Group’s consulting assignments.

The position, shall be independent contractor-based.  Licensed candidates are welcomed, and even encouraged.

This is an opportunity for an independent, driven, real estate professional to be part of one of the fastest growing companies in the industry.

The ideal candidate will possess:

• Minimum 10 years of commercial real estate brokerage experience
• Proven track record for success
• A higher industry-related designation, such as an SIOR, CRE, or CCIM is preferred, though not required
• Brokerage management experience is a major plus
• Excellent Communication, Presentation and Writing Skills
• Excellent Listening Skills
• MS Office, and ACT CRM Skills, preferred but not required

Serious inquiries only please.  Submit resumes to info@massimo-group.com, under the subject “CRE Coach Candidate”.

• Before Duke’s debacle in the NCAA tournament (one of the few reasons I will watch TV) a new Staples commercial caught my attention.  In this commercial, everyone in the office, including the President, the receptionist, the IT guy and the marketing team were the same person.  Dave, the redheaded, bearded entrepreneur, was the reflection of many struggling business owners and commercial real estate brokers.

They try to do it all and be all.

In my 25+ years as a broker, owner and manager of local, regional and international brokerage firms I have yet to find a top producing broker who can do it all.  I have however seen thousands of average brokers who try.

It’s either one of 2 scenarios.  Average brokers think that they really know more about prospecting, presenting, closing, marketing, social media, web design, computers, administrative work and answering the phone than anyone else, or they believe they can simply do it cheaper.

In Brokers Who Dominate, the 8 traits of top producers we explored how top performers
attained and maintain these top production levels.  One key trait is top brokers are “Team
Oriented”.

It doesn’t mean you have to go out and hire a team at high fixed costs or give away a nice portion of your commissions to create a team.  What it does mean is that you have to do these important steps to stop being average.

• Take an inventory of everything you are currently doing – and I mean everything.
• Determine how much you are worth –in relation to dollars per hour.
• Create a ‘Not To Do List’ and simply stop doing those things that do not:
• Make you money
• Bring you pleasure in doing

• Find someone else to do things that is better at doing them and cheaper than it is for you to do them!

Sorry to say top performers are smarter than average performers; they have accepted that they cannot do it all.  Take the 4 steps noted above and leave the ranks of average.  Don’t  be a Dave.

This past week I took a long weekend (yes we all need to take a day or two away from commercial real estate) and headed to Vail, Colorado for some skiing with some friends.  Some of these friends are commercial brokers, like you, and one particular friend, Jason of CNL, I had not connected with in quite some time.

In past Massimo Minutes, I have stressed the importance of presence.  I have outlined the three essential elements of creating and maintaining presence and outlined the key targets to direct these efforts towards.  These targets include clients, prospects, market makers and influencers.  There are certainly more extensive and detailed targets, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Two key targets in your individual presence campaign must be your friends and family.  Why; because I can guarantee you that most of them simply think of you as “a broker”.  They have little idea of what exactly this means and how you personally work with clients in a variety of ways to assist them in achieving their personal and/or business goals.

As for Jason, I had the luxury of sitting next to him on several subsequent ski lifts and shared with him how we work with individual brokers, brokerage teams and companies in our coaching and consulting practice.  How our entire organization is positioned to maximize our client’s brokerage income.  I shared with him that most (not all) trainers are vendors, where as we pursue the role of being partners and trusted allies in our client’s success.

The Massimo Minute is distributed to tens of thousands of commercial brokers, many of my friends and all of my family members, and now Jason as well.  The next time you send out  an email blast, success story, white paper or postcard think beyond the obvious targets and be sure to include your family and your friends, for they will be your biggest champions should they hear of an opportunity that may be a great fit for you.