Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Commercial Real Estate Brokers | Brokers Round Table
In this round table, brokers dive into the essential topic of Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and explore how the right metrics can sharpen their focus, improve client outcomes, and drive sustainable growth across industrial, office, and retail sectors. Each broker shares their strategies for selecting KPIs that provide a roadmap for success in their respective markets.
Key Takeaways:
Focus on habits and controllable actions rather than just setting outcome-based goals. Break down big goals into smaller, daily/weekly tasks.
Regularly communicate with clients, even if there is no new activity to report. Weekly or monthly check-ins can help maintain relationships.
Understand the evolving KPIs in different commercial real estate sectors, like the shift in retail from just sales per square foot to more holistic metrics.
Qualify potential clients quickly to ensure the assignment is a good fit and worth pursuing, especially in the retail sector.
Leverage simple, actionable goals like asking for referrals in every conversation to drive incremental progress.
Be open to feedback and suggestions from the audience to improve future discussions and cover topics of interest.
Check out CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate developer and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Episode Transcript:
Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go? Series central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level, cre Central has the resources you need visit www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast. We are back with another brokers round table. And look, if you're a commercial real estate broker, if you're in sales, even if you're an investor, this is going to be an impactful conversation for you, because it doesn't matter what your overarching goal is, if you're not taking the little actions on a daily basis that will actually propel you forward toward achieving that, and that's what we're going to be diving into with Chad and Adam today. I think Jesse's probably going to be out unless he may be able to join us here in a bit. But we're diving into KPIs key performance indicators. What are the daily, weekly, monthly tasks that you as a commercial real estate broker should be tracking and aiming to hit so that you can continue moving forward on your goals? Right? If you want to make $200,000 that's a cool goal, but what are you going to do on a daily basis to move you towards that? Chad, we're going to start with you. Man, we're gonna dive into identifying KPIs. How do you figure out which KPIs matter and what you should be tracking? So when it comes to industrial brokers, like, what are the top KPIs that you're tracking to measure your growth, your productivity, etc,
yeah, this is a bit of a complex answer, because I think that there's a few different directions we could take it, and I think it's also going to vary, depending on who it is. There might be somebody that's brand new into the business that is working for a big firm, and that big firm might direct what their KPI should be. They might actually tell them what they are, and that's what any sales meaning that they have anything that they're reporting to, that's what they're going to be going off. And then it's also changed. So I've, I've been 20 years in the business now in brokerage, the KPIs I tracked at the beginning are actually different than what I tracked now, when I first started, I tracked everything. I tracked every piece of data I possibly could. So I would, I at one point, I could tell you exactly how many square feet, at least, how many square feet I've sold, not just for the year, but cumulatively. I could tell you how many deals I've done. I could tell you what my average deal size was. I could tell you volume, transaction value. I tracked everything over time. I've moved away less so from trying to hit KPIs and more focused on habits. And there's, there's that great book out there as well that talks about this, as well as, instead of being goal oriented, try to be habit focused. And I think that that's what's the evolution of my career is. Now I'm less focused on trying to hit an average deal size, or trying to have a certain amount of deals or having something in the pipe. And I'm more just focused on what are the routine things that I can do, whether it's calling brokers in other markets and asking them if they have any business and in my market that they could send if I make a certain number of calls that day, if I make some outbound calls, if I'm following up with clients, I think if I can track what I can control, it just makes it easier to focus on that. And I guess maybe I just learned that over the career, is that I can set goals for myself and say, Well, I want my average transaction size to be 30 grand a deal. And that's fine, but certain things you just can't control. There might not be a market for those types of deals at any given time. And instead of doing nothing, I might pivot and try to work on smaller deals or maybe something big lands on my table, and it distorts those numbers so those variables are very hard to predict and control. Whereas I can control how many brokers I call, if I just wanted to call all the SIRs in Tennessee, I can control doing that, and I don't know what the outcome is, because it's it varies. It's an election day today. If I were to try calling people today, no one probably would want to talk to me about a potential referral business. But so those things all vary, but I can still control how many calls I'm making. So I've, I've gone from being very deliberate and very systematic about tracking everything to now, just trying to track things that I can control and that that works well for me. It's not necessarily the best answer. I think everyone has to find their own stride and figure out what what they can track and do it consistently. But that's just what's worked for me as of right now. I think that's
the. Right way of looking at it, though, right? Like, you go incredibly high level, and all of those metrics that you tracked, they're great for marketing, right? You still need all of that as a broker. But kind of like what you were saying, those are outcomes, right? Those aren't KPIs. Like, the hey, I want to average a $30,000 commission check on every deal I do. That's an outcome, right? The KPIs like, I'm going to make five cold calls today, $2 million properties, right? And I'm going to do that every day for the next 365, days. And then I'm going to start tracking, you know, what my percentage, you know, close rate is for how many calls you got to make. And that's what I love about this, is that you can take something that seems daunting, right? Because as as a commercial real estate broker sitting down and saying, I've got to make 1000 cold calls this month, it's kind of daunting. But if you look at it's like, Hey, I got to do 10 today, 20 today. That's it. And break it down to these bite sized chunks. That's how I like to look at my KPIs. And that's cool that you've done it too, man. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, you can track 1000 different things that's like, what, what actually matters, right? What is actually and that actually kind of, kind of leans into our, our question of the day here, right? What is the one KPI that has had the biggest impact on your business's growth? Because there, there is probably just one KPI that has had at least 80% of the impact on your business. Adam, we're going to roll it over to you, man, as a retail broker, what, what metrics are you tracking in terms of leasing performance, tenant satisfaction, sales, like, what are the important KPIs in that industry?
So I want to split your question into two answers. Because first of all, that was, that was a beautifully said answer that we just heard. And I really echo the same sentiment when I, when I started, it was all about, like, mine was all scratch pad. I like to write free hand, and it was all goals. It's like, what is the goal? What? What do I have to do this week, to move this goal forward, or to move this this deal forward. I really shifted a lot during COVID. I tell this to people a lot. Before COVID, all I did was run into a wall as hard as I can, over and over and over. You know, was thrilled to be where I was in business at that point. And the only thing I knew was like, C deal, do deal. See space, fill space. It was very much kind of a hamster wheel and COVID, my business shut down during COVID. Not a lot of people doing retail deals with a government shutdown, right? Like it was just like, it's so it was the first time that I really had more than just a fleeting minute to sit down and figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life for the next five or 10 years. So I switched it from kind of a weekly like, what am I going to bang out this week, to what are my real goals? And I try to keep, I mean, this sounds super cheesy, but I keep them written down. I keep them written down in a notebook that I have with me a lot. And I try to always work backwards from goals now, and use that to kind of set my KPIs and they and they vary to week like sometimes I'm focused on on pipeline. Pipeline in my world is so freaking huge, and I know that's very cliche to say in a sales job, but my deals take so long to come to fruition. It's hilarious, like I'm working on the biggest deal that I'm working on right now. I've probably been working on for free for like, three years, right? So I'm so part of my KPIs is all about what's that next level pipeline, whether it's a big tenant rollout that I know is still a year away. I mean, we could have one tenant rollout that's 1015, 20 stores. We could have one, you big account, retail account, that's 50, 60,000 square feet, and an average, you know, lease rate, is 4550, bucks a foot, so those get to be sizable deals. So that's me kind of skirting around your question of, I kind of redo my KPIs based on based on the season, based on the week. But one thing I want to quickly mention, without hog and air time, is how much KPIs have changed in the retail industry, that, you know, maybe this isn't going to be a direct help to brokers that are that are trying to kind of block and tackle, but I think it's really important to note, and frankly, I could do an entire podcast just on this, the retail industry. The the lifeblood of the retail industry is sales per square foot, right? And that is, that is what everything matters, like the less square footage you can use to do X number of of dollars in sales per square foot is the holy grail. KPI, but, but Tyler, why do you think that metric has gotten skewed or changed in the last four years? Like, what would be? What would be? The reason that that is not. Quite as telling of a metric as it was four or five years ago,
I would imagine the shift to mixed use, like a mixed use focus in retail, or just the way that that these shops are shifting like, I mean, the way that we do business on the retail side of things has entirely changed,
exactly, right? So you went into, you went into that store. Let's just use tacos for an example, right? Because they're kind of popping up in a lot of retail stores. You went into tacos like, do they want you to buy a pair of $1,000 boots at to COVID? Hell yeah, they do. But you know what else is just as good to them. You go in, you're like, Man, I keep seeing this. You know, it's a big purchase. Maybe I'll wait for it to be on sale, but I want to go into tacos. I want to try on a pair of those boots. I want to try on those Pearl snap cool shirts that are 350 bucks. And maybe I'm just not in a position to buy it today. Maybe I'm waiting for a deal to close. Maybe I want to show a picture of it to my wife to make sure that I don't look at dork, right? But you're gonna go into that store, you're gonna try that on and be like, Yo fit check. And you might not buy it until you get home or tomorrow or next week, but you're gonna buy it through that to COVID site. So the KPIs have changed to and retailers, retail landlords are struggling to keep up. It's like, wait a minute, how I'm not getting nearly enough credit for the sales you're doing per square foot, because we haven't figured out that KPI metric. So this is, this is a very, very hot topic in retail right now, and I don't want to hog the whole show talking about it, but I do want to bring it up that that is, it's changing in real time right now. Yeah.
I mean, look, you're not, you're not hiding it. If you got interesting things to talk about, keep going. But, I mean, the thing like, that's really interesting because I hadn't thought about this, but a lot, especially when you get into these bigger shopping centers, or just bigger, you know, retail developments, oftentimes the landlords are going to have a percentage rent. Oh, yeah, they are with these deals. And if somebody's going online, yeah, if they're going online, they're not getting a percent of that income, right?
And we, and we care a lot about occupancy and health scores, right, like, what is your percentage of rent as a total of your top line sales. That's why we require people to report sales to us. We even have sales floors where I might be able to recapture your space if you suck, right? Like you told me you were going to do 850, a foot, if you're not doing 450, a foot, bro, you got to go. There's a prettier girl to dance, right? So these things, these things are changing in real time, and they're massively, massively influential in my world, yeah,
man, it's really interesting to think about just how, like, we don't, most people don't see that, right? I mean, even I, as an investor, we don't see how much things have really changed in the retail world. I do a bunch of retail but like hearing you go into that like, it's really interesting for me to think through all of the minor compounding implications that at some point snowball into something really big. Well,
let's talk about Warby Parker for just a second, and I'm just gonna hog the this entire interview.
Good. Keep going. Man, yeah, interesting
when they're looking for a new space. They these digitally native companies, the companies that did not start in brick and mortar, they started online. Their tracking metrics are massively evolved, right? Like they are. They are very, very high tech. So Warby Parker already knows either what zip code they're selling a lot of their frames in, or where they think they should be selling because it matches their demographics and psychographics across their across their network. But they're not right. So they can either use those analytics to go in and pop a store right into fertile ground where they know they're going to do a lot of sales or like something's wrong, people don't know about us here, even though our customer lives works plays in this market. We we need to pop a store here to get our brand awareness up so these digitally native companies are kind of changing the game. Super cool, if you're a dork like me? Yeah,
it's basically just a marketing ploy, which is really, really interesting to look at it that way.
Yeah, Billboard, but for them it makes sense. Well, it's
the same reason that companies go into Times Square, right? You'll never be able to sell enough goods to justify having a shop in Times Square, even if you're Rolex. It's just to have the brand presence and be in front of all of those people. Yeah. I mean, talk, you talked earlier, Adam about about goals and starting kind of with your overarching goal and then working your way back, reverse engineering it. I think that's a really great way to do it. I use the smart method when I'm when I'm digging into my goal. I make sure that each one is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time bound. So for example, I'll run you guys through one of my goals for next year, that's to grow the brokerage team by three additional brokers, right? So it's specific, I'm hiring three new commercial real estate brokers. It's measurable. I can track the progress by quarterly brokerage performance and team growth. It's achievable, because obviously, I've got five people on the team now I can go hire three more, right? It's not like I'm trying to grow 50 brokers next year. It's relevant, because growing the sales team means more success for the Cauble group and whatever we've got going on. And then it's time bound, so I have to hit this by q4 of 2025, so I like breaking that down. Then, of course, I mean, we don't have to go this far into detail, but then I've got it broken down even further into the action items that I'll be taking each quarter to make sure that we are focused on growing the team with with the right kinds of people. Chad getting, getting back into the industrial side of things. Let's talk about using KPIs to improve your client acquisition and retention, right? Because, hey, at the end of the day, as commercial real estate brokers, that is probably one of the biggest things that we should be focused on. Because if you can improve your client acquisition and retention, especially if you can improve the retention part, you may never have to prospect ever again. So on the industrial side of things, how do you as an industrial broker, leverage client related KPIs to increase your repeat business? What are you tracking?
Yeah, that's a great question, and I know you, but guys both own properties as well, so you've been on this side of what I'm going to try and approach this from is what doesn't work. And you guys have both been investors, you'll know very well what's one of the most frustrating thing that owners hear, and that's nothing they list the property you get a broker comes in. He gives a really good pitch. He's got all these ideas and all this energy, and he's he's the dog and pony show, and then the property gets listed, and then they never hear from him again. And weeks, sometimes months, go by and there's not so much as a call. I think one thing brokers can very effectively do is maintain the existing listings by making a concerted effort to regularly touch base with their clients. And I can tell you from having clients that now go back 20 years, for me, is that they never not want to hear from you if they've got an active listing with you, and it's a space that's available either to sell or to lease, they want to hear from you if there's nothing else but to say we didn't have any inbound activity this week, we called a bunch of people. Here's some of the feedback that we're getting. A quick update. Maybe you want to talk about a market specific transaction that happened. Maybe you want to talk some news with them. If you can commit to just having a phone call once a week is is great, in my mind, it but no, no less than once a month, and if you're only calling once a month, it better be a pretty elaborate phone call where you're providing them with some substantial value. If you do that, and I've just had listings like this, I've had listings that I've kept for a long period of time through lulz in the market and inactivity, but if the client always feels that you're feel you're following up with them, they know you're attentive. They know that you're on top of it. That can prolong the amount of time that you can keep a listing, if for no other reason, then you could be doing everything behind the scenes. But if the property owner isn't hearing from you, is as soon as he gets an itch to change, you're gone, whereas you could be having no activity. But as long as you're following up with them and doing that regularly, you're prolonging the chances of keeping that listing longer. So I think the most simple thing you can do for KPIs is just make it a weekly objective where you're calling to give an update very quickly. Here's here's the activity. Did you hear about this opportunity in the market? Maybe it's another deal you want to pitch them on, but just having a weekly conversation with them is way more effective than sending an email. It's way more effective than sending a text, and it's definitely better than doing nothing. So I think that that's like very simple, simple goals, like much, much how you're describing the SMART goals. I think they just need to be simple. You need a very simple objectives that you can and everybody should do this. I've had a long running thing in my calendar. Every Friday at 10 o'clock, I'm sending out notifications to my clients, and then I'm following up with a phone call later that afternoon. Every Friday, I routinely do that. So I think that that's again, it kind of goes back to reframing what your objective is. Is your objective to have an actual goal? I think that's great. But what are you doing? What are the action items? What are the habits? What are the things you actually routinely do that are going to produce the result that you're looking for? So that'd be the biggest one, I'd say, on client retention, is you'd spend so much time getting the listing do everything you can to be in front of that client at week. Is optimal. In my mind,
that's that's so well said, Todd, I didn't mean to cut you off, but, you know, I say this all the time, and you put it more eloquently than I, than I do, like we, especially in retail, like a lot of times, I can't make the market right. I've got 3000 square feet on a pin corner. It's going to be expensive as hell. We're going to have to have the right credit. We only want to do Mediterranean food or whatever freaking craziness. My landlord says I can't make that market right? There's only 10 of those guys in the country, right? Or maybe 50, whatever it is. But I can do everything I can to communicate with that landlord. So I'm still the guy with the sign up when that deal makes. So you say it way better than I do. But I cannot tell you how dead on if you're listening to this and you don't hear anything else anybody says all day, that's that's freaking gold.
Yeah, I mean, that's like the lowest hanging fruit, and it's by far the biggest, ripest, best fruit. Well, I know, but like, the thing is, I mean, I get onto my team every now and then, like, if I ever hear that they haven't been giving somebody regular updates, because, in my opinion, that's like the one KPI you really have to pay attention to, right? It's just, how often are you communicating with your clients? And let me put it this way, most commercial real estate brokers think that a monthly update is fine. Most residential brokers think that an update every 48 hours isn't enough. They are on it, right? And to be fair, their transactions are a lot faster, so there's typically more happening. But most commercial real estate brokers don't want to update you or communicate with you unless there's an update something that has happened. But here's the thing, I as an owner, am going to sit there and think this guy's not calling me, he's not emailing me, he's not doing anything on this deal. What else am I supposed to be thinking? Right? So I think that's a brilliant point. Chad, I think that that is absolutely something that people should be working on. And as far as simple goals go, Dude, I love that. I mean, just pick one thing. There's like, so there's a there's a guy that I do business with. He helps me with a hiring process of my team. Now he runs culture index, and I was thinking about this was the first thing that came to mind when you said that, Chad, he has a phrase that he uses every single time that we talk, every single time. And I'm like, man, he probably made it a goal one time to just make sure that he says that. And it's worked for him very well. Every time we talk, he says, By the way, Tyler, you know, I hope that you're getting a lot of value out of what I do. I work almost exclusively on referrals. So if you know anybody, please send them my way. And the first time that he said that, I was like, Oh yeah, that's pretty cool. The second time he said that, I was like, oh yeah. He does do that. The third time he said it, it stuck in my head to where I was like, Okay, next time something comes up with anybody, I'm going to bring him up. And I sent him two or three clients already that have probably spent 10s of 1000s of dollars with him. So all because he probably just made it a simple goal to follow up every conversation with that. Adam.
And can I add on to that real Yeah, like when I think people get overwhelmed by thinking of goals, and I think we've probably all been conditioned to it to an extent where you have to fill out a full form, and here's how, here's everything that I'm going to do, and it's a full checklist, and those become unruly very quickly, exactly as you just said, you can take a small goal like that, And most people probably wouldn't even frame it that way. They wouldn't say, I'm just going to make it a goal to say this one thing in every conversation that I have. You could start doing that right now. You could start. You get off this call. You next person you call as you say, Hey, I'm looking to grow my business. And if you're happy with what I've done, if you could send me some referrals, I'd greatly appreciate it. And if you just said, I'm going to try to do that, I'm going to try to add that to every conversation that I had. That is such a simple thing to start incorporating into your business that doesn't even it won't even change how you do business, but the outcome of that could be profound. So well said, I completely agree
with that. Yeah, I just wrote down. I'm going to make it a goal to make sure that I ask for a review or a thumbs up or a retweet on every single one of these that we do. I do it occasionally, but I don't do it so consistently, because, like, I listen to podcasts, and when somebody says that in every episode, I'm like, oh, yeah, I do need to go leave these guys a review, because I listen to this every day. So there you go. Now, I'm going to start bothering you guys more of that. Let's do
it right now. It's, there's looks like there's a number of people tuned in. If you're getting value from this, let us know. Or if there's something else you want us to talk about, or something you want us to cover in a future episode, let us know, because I think that's how we're all going to grow together, as if we're listening to feedback and taking suggestions. And I went live on my channel before this. I just. Said, I love chatting with you guys, because i i Come away so energized from these myself, just having different ideas or hearing about, like, the retail and the cost per square footage, I never would have even considered that. So I love these myself, so I'm hoping that other people are getting similar type of value. Yeah,
I agree. I mean, I love hearing y'all, y'all stuff. I mean, that's the cool thing about this, right? Everybody's in a different sector, you know. And y'all all bring something so interesting to the table, which makes these, honestly, selfishly, so fun for me. But, yeah, hey, there's 31 people watching this live right now. Leave us a like, retweet us, tag us. Leave us a comment, whatever. Let's, let's have some fun with it. Let us know. Also, like, yeah, leave your comments. We want to know. What do you guys want us to talk about more? I mean, we're not going to run out of ideas. I think we could all talk to a wall. We're commercial real estate brokers. But it doesn't hurt to know your opinions. Adam, on the retail side, I think this is really interesting. So typically, in most office transactions, in most industrial transactions. You know, you're typically going to do one deal with a client and then they're probably not going to do another deal in that market. They may. You know, if you're a distribution facility, you'll probably go eight hours away, right? If you're if you're an Office tenant, you're probably going to go a two hour flight away, right? Retail is different, because, you know, we were talking about a tenant this past week, and I need to get you introduced to that group, by the way, but we were talking, you know, this past week, and like, if, if a burger chain happens to go to Charlotte, they're not doing one location, they're probably going to do 3468, so how do you look at that in terms of your client acquisition costs versus lifetime value of that client. What KPIs Do you track to maintain those relationships?
So a couple things. One, I've said this before, it's got to check kind of the brand box for me. So the So, the so the tenant itself has to be kind of in a wheelhouse that I like to play in, right? So I don't do nothing against hookah lounges or things like that. A lot of people that that call that, it's just not, not my thing. I try to refer it out or make sure they have something. So a brand check is important on kind of the retail side, just because of what I do, the realistic check, the realism check, right? Like it does not, I don't need an academic exercise in the in the retail brokerage world, right? Like, if you have unrealistic goals, expectations, pricing, all of that, I just You got to have a reality check, right? So that's another thing that is important to me. Size is important. Like, if it's a really difficult assignment, and they're only doing 1000 square foot deals, and it's not something that I own, or I'm an investor in, or something like that, probably not worth it. And then credit, right? Like, if somebody's coming in my immediate ask, you know, I get, I get a phone call for a new lead. It's like, hey, you know, talk to me about your business plan. You know, send that over to me. Like, there's just certain qualifying questions that you ask really, really quickly in the retail world, especially when you're when your phone is, is kind of all over the city that are simple qualifying questions that you can ask that maybe when you're early in the business, you're kind of, like, maybe a little nervous to ask, or maybe like, are a little too forward. I ask them immediately, unless it's a referral from somebody just to make sure that I'm spinning wheels. So those are some of the things that I want to go through every single time, whether it's whether it's a landlord, because landlords can be just as outrageously unrealistic as tenants, or whether it's a tenant.
Yeah, so true. That's great man. Aaron Downey is saying great discussion guys. Danny jump dead said, You guys are amazing. I think, I think he's talking about you two, not necessarily me. Derek, say hello. All appreciate you guys for joining us and jumping in the conversation. Guys, we're out of time. Thank you so much for diving into this with me today. What a great conversation.
Fireworks now. Page
turn call with attorneys.
Dude, you're you've been holding that back from us this entire
time. Sometimes, like,
my gosh,
we've been covering the wrong topics this whole time. You're holding this gold mine from Is this what we should have been doing? A tutorial on how
to really impress your clients on a zoom call or get fired? Yeah, that's right, it was appreciate you guys. We'll see y'all in the next one. Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go. Siri central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help. Help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level, cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www.crecentral.com to learn more you
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