Best Real Estate Cold Calling Strategy - Residential & Commercial

You're licensed and ready to start your first steps in prospecting clients. It's a tough business but has a huge payoff for the top performers. How can you start prospecting effectively?

You'll often hear from others that cold calling is a dead practice - yet we cannot stress how far this is from the truth. If you ask top agents in both commercial and residential real estate, 90% of the time they will tell you that this is still their #1 strategy for prospecting new clients. You may have tried cold calling already. Maybe a couple of weeks has gone by and still, your cold calls have not led to a new client or even generating a promising lead.

Or maybe you're 5 years into the industry and just looking for fresh ideas on how to improve your prospecting. Just picking up the phone and introducing yourself / your company is not enough anymore.

Landlords and investment property owners with 1-3 properties will get a call from a broker at least once a week. Landlords with 8+ properties are getting called probably at least once a day.

What does this mean for you?

Not only must you outwork your competition, you must differentiate yourself from every other broker that's calling to set a meeting. You need to be leading with value in your cold calls.

If you're new to the industry, you'll learn soon enough that a very small portion of agents actually cold call properly. I've personally been in an open-floor office with 50+ agents all cold calling at the same time. It's obvious who is doing it right and who is doing it wrong.

So what do I mean by leading with value? - the most simple way of saying this is to Have useful information ready to share with the owner

This doesn't need to be that hard, no need to overthink it. For residential agents:This can mean you're sharing with them sales comparables in their neighborhood. Inform your prospects about the properties that are being sold next to their homes, as well as the values of the sales.

Try to dig up more information in ways that other agents aren't. This can mean calling the listing agents of properties in the neighborhood to gather information that you can then share to your prospects.

For commercial agents:If you're selling apartments, many times landlords don't know what market rents actually are. Sharing with them rents around the area is useful information for them, as they can know whether they have the ability to get more value out of their investment properties.

For retail / industrial properties, one of the most useful tactics would be to offer them a (free) valuation on their property. Generating a BOV (Broker's Opinion of Value) is one of the best ways you can become memorable in your prospect's busy life. There's a lot of ways for you to be able to come up with different strategies, but the most important one that is commonly underused is to simply lead with value.