Pushing Dirt

Whether you’re looking to buy deals or list them, you need to “farm” for them - develop relationships with prospective sellers over time and build the necessary connection to win the business.

The best approach is to start with a product and a geographic area - a city, town, county or submarket: whatever feels manageable.

Then you need to build an owner database. If you can afford it and they are active in your market, Costar can give you a headstart on this database building process as they make an effort to track every office, industrial, flex and retail building in the markets they serve (in the Washington DC area where I am active are weaker on the retail side; I don’t know about other ares). Costar gives you the list of buildings with locations, photos, maps and basic building details, but the tracking of owners is poor.

At this point you hopefully have a list of 25 to 100 buildings or so. Learn everything you can about these buildings. Visit them in person or virtually though Google Earth Street View, Windows Live Maps birdseye view, etc. Using public record data found on smartpages.net and from your state and county records, find who owns each building. I subscribe to Lexis Nexis for access to unlisted phone numbers.

You can track the data in a three ring binder, an excel or MS Access database, or a contact management program like Act!, outlook, or one designed specially for our industry like REA or Realhound.

Then you need to make regular contact. Start with the dreaded cold call by phone. Don’t just ask them to sell; build a relationship. Find out how you can help them to make money, what they want to accomplish. Capture their email address for future use.

Regular phone contact should happen every quarter at a minimum unless the first call was a disaster and you were hung up on.

Accompany your phone contact with regular mailers: I use post card mailings or email to announce new listings and sold transaction. An investor can announce new acquisitions and the like.

It’s not rocket science, it’s the way brokers and investors have found deals for decades. We just have many more great new tools at our disposal.

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doing a test run with an indian telemarketing firm to identify users of search for space to lease or buy.

I wrote the script and provided the list (from dun and bradstreet, or rather d&b). The price?

1000 names and numbers from d&b at 14 cents each: $140

40 hours of telemarketing time at $4.95 per hour (firm projects they will be able to call and speak to or voice mail all prospects in this time frame) $198

For a grand total of $338.

they are appointment setting calls (i.e. ‘would you like to hear from an agent about space opportunities…)

should be interesting…even one lead — one that i could refer to another agent for a 25% referral fee — would pay for the effort (or rather lack of effort) many times over….

I’ll keep you posted.

If you suspect you’re going to have trouble getting a prospect to return your call, consider this (some may say devious) tactic.

Leave a message, pretending the voice mail cut you off, e.g, ” <BEEP> so give me a call and we can talk about it…again, it’s Chris and you can reach me at 443-574-1415.”

People are innately curious, you may find that the return-call rate is astounding.