Commercial real estate leads are highly sought after by brokers everywhere, and this is for good reason. Commercial real estate leads are very hard and take a lot of time to generate. Think about how brokers generate leads of tenants & buyers they can represent or to fill vacant listings:

  • Cold calling
  • Cold emails
  • Networking

These things take a lot of time an energy. The average sales appointment rate is 2%. That means that if you want to generate 1 to 2 appointments, you have to make 100 cold calls. The average phone call length is 7.5 minutes. That means that to get these 2 appointments you have to spend almost 12 hours cold calling. That’s a lot of time.

Cold emails to tenant & buyer prospects can be more efficient, but finding email addresses can be just as time consuming as making cold calls.

Networking takes a lot of time too. You spend time driving to the destination to meet networking buddies, spend hours socializing, then spend days and months keeping in touch and asking them if they have any tenants or buyers leads in the market for commercial real estate.

The problem with these commercial real estate lead generation tactics is that it takes too much damn time. The solution is for sure to work smarter, not harder.

So how do you work smarter to generate more commercial real estate leads with less time and effort?

There Are 2 Guiding Principles:

  1. Go where the tenants & buyers are fishing
  2. Get them to contact you

 

Where Tenants & Buyers Fish

Where do you think tenants & buyers go to find space available? Do you think they google for CBRE’s website? Call random brokers they find listed online? Call their friends to find out what’s available?

Nope!

The likelihood they’ll visit your brokerage’s website when they’re looking for space is virtually zero. They are more likely to call their friends for a referral — and given how tenants & buyers look for space this has a low likelihood as well.

Google and LoopNet ran a study that revealed 78% of people looking to lease or purchase use online commercial real estate tools or services to find it. So where do tenants & buyers fish for space?

The internet!

That means if you step up your SEO and online presence, you can get in front of some of the 78% tenants & buyers trying to find space. SEO will take time and money to work. Any improvements to your Google ranking could take 3 to 6 months to kick in. Also, SEO Consultants who can do this work for you can be very expensive.

But there’s actually a better & cheaper way to generate commercial real estate leads. And that is…. to stand on the shoulders of those who already have a massive online presence like LoopNet, Digsy and other CRE Marketplaces.

For example:

On average, less than 2% of tenants & buyers inquire on a listing. That means that only 2 listings are out of 100 are going to generate a lead. What’s the likelihood your listing is one of the 2 listings. It’s low. Yep, that sucks.

However, you can actually tap the other 98 people to become a lead even if they don’t inquire on your listing.

The trick is to get them to reveal themselves to you when looking at your listing — even if the listing is not gonna work for them. The trick is….

Lead Capture Widgets.

Don’t upload PDF brochures, floor plans or links to property websites to listing services without a lead capture widget. The pop-up should offer the tenant or buyer help finding space faster so they save time. By crunching the past couple of years of data we’ve found that for every 1 lead that inquires on a listing on Digsy, the lead capture pop-up will generate 3 to 4 additional leads.

To embed a lead capture widget, you can use a free tool called, Sniply or you can use the Digsy Lead Capture widget for Commercial real estate.

 

Using Sniply to capture commercial real estate leads

Snip.ly will allow you to create a link, whether it is to a website or dropbox file with a lead capture widget like below.

 

Sniply Commercial Real Estate Lead Generation

See it in action by clicking here

Advantages

  1. Very easy to use
  2. Free (limited functionality)

Limitations

  1. Sniply doesn’t provide a form to collect the CRE space requirements of a lead. So you will need to pay for an online form builder ($30-$60/mo) and design a one custom form for office space, one for industrial, and one for retail to collect a lead’s space requirements
  2. Sniply free will stop working after a certain number of clicks and then you’ll have to upgrade ($29-$150/mo) your account

 

 

Using Digsy Lead Capture Widget for Commercial Real Estate Leads

Digsy’s lead capture widget allows you to turn any link or cloud file into a professional looking message that captures a tenant’s attention and collects their commercial real estate requirements. It looks more interactive and gets tenants to engage with you.

This is what it looks like.

 

Digsy Commercial Real Estate Leads

 

 

When the user clicks the button at the bottom of the lead capture widget, they are automatically routed to a form that collects the type of space they’re looking for, size range and additional requirements.

 

Digsy Lead Capture Form

See it in action by clicking here

 

Advantages

  1. Very easy to use
  2. Unlimited clicks
  3. Appears interactive & draws more leads to engage
  4. Provides built-in lead capture forms for Office, Industrial and Retail space
  5. Sends receipt notification to lead via email
  6. Text message & email alerts when a new lead is captured
  7. Build-in leads dashboard
  8. Automatically creates a lead in your Digsy Ai CRM account

Limitations

  1. Not Free
  2. Cannot customize message (yet)

 

 

Want to give the Digsy Lead Capture Widget a try?

REQUEST ACCESS TO DIGSY WIDGET NOW!

 

We hope this helps you crush it in commercial real estate. We regularly update this article with more commercial real estate lead generation tips and tricks. Be sure to signup for our newsletter so you don’t miss them. Also, check our commercial real estate cold calling scripts to generate more clients.