Customers and most particularly property owners, business owners, and tenants are at the centre of your business model. Long term customer relationships and referrals will help you grow your market share as an agent.

Given all of these things you really do need a business plan to move ahead as a commercial real estate agent. Without some form of plan you will likely struggle. The plan will help you with focus when it comes to the key issues in your personal business. It will also help you with prospecting and growing market share.

Here are some of the bigger issues to merge into you planning process:

• Where is your property market? You will need to define exactly where your listings and contacts will come from. It could be a town or a city, but either way you must define it so you know where to prospect on a daily basis.
• Set some boundaries inside the town or city as your primary focus area. Define a ‘primary location’ that contains enough property owners and properties for you to work on. In most cases that should be 2000 businesses and properties. When you do this you can break the zone up into streets and zones where you can dissect the property ownership and tenant information. That will then help your prospecting activities.
• Understand what a client looks like to you and the type of business you can get from them. In most cases you should be focusing on property investors, property developers, business owners, tenants, and owner occupiers. When you know what the ideal clients are, you can then find them and set up the required presentations and market information.
• What will be your property focus? It is an interesting question, but you really should focus on a particular property type and location in your geographical area. From that you can easily understand the factors of property use and occupancy. Prices, rents, lease strategies, and marketing alternatives then take shape and become far more specific; on that basis you are of higher value to the clients that you serve. You are then a specialist.