How Real Estate Brokers Get Exclusive Listings Without Cold Calling Case Study
When I started in commercial real estate sales in NYC, the first thing I did was catalog my target market. What I mean by Cataloging my market is this .... I put together 3 ring notebooks, 1 for each block in my market. In total, I had 90 note books. I took photos of each building. Then I pasted the photos on a page just for that building. I gathered the owners information including address and phone number. I approached the process systematically. Step by step. In 2 weeks, the catalogs were complete. At the time, I knew very little about NYC and less about real estate. Once I was finished with my catalogs, I froze. Now what? I actually have to call the owners? What should I say when i call? So, here's what I did. I went to City Hall. I found a library with archives of building information that went back decades. The books had building pages with 20 years of property sale information. It wrote it down. Back then we had pens and notebooks. No doubt, no one would do this level of research. I broke the sales data down by property type, size and location. I created charts and spread sheets. I had them typed and sent to the owners in my market. Imagine an owner getting 20 years of sales data about the properties in their market. Once sent in the mail, I picked up the phone. I started calling owners. I asked them if they received my market information. Some hung up on me, some said yes and hung up. Some thanked me. And a few said they wanted to sell. I never asked if they wanted to sell. If they did, they told me so. Every day, I repeated the calling strategy. The calls were not cold, they were warm. Some hot. Little did I know, this strategy would evolve into Proof Stacking. A business system of promoting market information and success stories to a target audience of 500 building owners. Today, the sweet spot is a market size of 1,000 - 1,200 owners. The difference today is we use websites, email, social media and videos to get the word out. The result is warm calls, never a cold call.