When I started my career in commercial & industrial property broking in 1998, I obtained my leads as follows (in order of effectiveness):
1. Personal Contact (telephone prospecting, networking, meetings, established relationships & referrals resulting from good service)
2. Signboards
3. Print media (newspaper advertising, editorials and advertorials)
4. Direct Mail (Flyers & Letters)
5. Digital Marketing (in those days the only avenue was mass faxing using Winfax)
This has changed quite a bit now and now my leads are obtained as follows (in order of effectiveness):
1. Personal Contact (telephone prospecting, networking, meetings, established relationships & referrals resulting from good service)
2. Digital Marketing (websites, social media, email marketing campaigns, property portals)
3. Signboards
4. Direct Mail (Flyers & Letters)
5. Print media (newspaper advertising, editorials and advertorials)
What hasn’t changed is that my No 1 source of business is still personal contact. I analysed my last 5 years of business and 80% of it was sourced from personal contact & existing relationships. The crazy thing is that 80% of a broker’s time these days is concerned with digital marketing, which brings less than 20% of really good leads! For this reason, I only put investment properties on my website that are generally not a big secret and that are widely known about in the market!
The reason is quite simple: when I get a hot industrial Investment property listing, I can usually pick up the phone and make targeted calls to well-qualified clients and 99% of the time, I will sell or lease the property. If I put it on the internet, my opposition will get to know my hot listings and further propagate them on the internet!
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that digital marketing is highly important as it increases my market presence and it is a critical component of my overall marketing strategy. I do believe that the best quality leads are those you get by building relationships, adding value to those relationships and keeping in contact with them, so you know when they have a need and service it well, so they do not need to search property portals.
I am sure, that by now prospective industrial tenants, buyers and investors must be getting fed up with searching for properties on the internet, where every broker (usually inexperienced and lacking any knowledge of the market) is advertising the same properties as everyone else and 90% of the properties are out of date and have either been sold, leased or withdrawn from the market! Property 24 is the best example of this, where in my opinion, a big percentage of the properties searched on, are not actually available!
