The 3 Fastest Ways to Get Your First Commercial Listing | Brokers Round Table
In this episode, we break down the top three fastest ways to land your first commercial real estate listing—whether you’re transitioning from residential, starting out in CRE, or hitting the reset button. Join Chad (Industrial), Jesse (Office), and Adam (Retail) as they each share practical, sector-specific strategies that helped them build early traction and credibility.
We cover:
- How to mine your existing network for warm CRE leads
- Tactical approaches to hyper-local market farming that actually work
- Proven techniques to position yourself as a local expert—online and off
Key Takeaways:
Leverage Your Existing Network
Share what you do professionally
Have one-on-one conversations
Tell stories about successful clients
Ask for specific referrals
Hyper Local Farming
Focus on a manageable geographical area
Walk and know your target market
About 5% of properties may be interested in trading at any time
Door knocking, cold calling, and direct mail can be effective
Position Yourself as an Online Expert
Use platforms like LinkedIn, podcasts, blogs
Share valuable market insights and data
Create content that solves problems
Tell stories about your deals, highlighting unique solutions
Showcase market trends and statistics
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:
Tyler Cauble 0:00
This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www dot cre central.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast. We are live with another brokers roundtable today, diving into our experience and sharing it with you on the three fastest ways to get your first commercial real estate listing. Whether you're a residential real estate agent, you're a new commercial broker, or you're just interested in getting into commercial real estate brokerage, getting your first listing is definitely a major milestone. You want to make sure that you do it right, and you do it as fast as possible. That way you can kind of kick your career off the right way. So we're gonna be diving into leveraging your existing network first. Chad, how do you identify industrial properties and opportunities within your existing network, right? Like, especially from contacts that may not even know that they need a broker yet?
Speaker 1 1:20
Yeah, great way to kick it off. I think that that's the key, is you do need to share with everybody that that's what you do for a living. I think that there's two types of salesmen out there. I say salesmen ubiquitously, including guys and girls. They tend to either share too much or they don't share enough. And so we probably all see that on LinkedIn and in social media where they'll say, oh, just listed or just sold, and every post is some iteration of that. Those are the ones that are just trying to ram it down everyone's face that they're in business and they're successful, having listings or having get getting deals done. Then there's the other ones that don't share anything. They're just on there. They're maybe observers. They're lurkers. They're not actually communicating with anybody that they're active. So I think you got to strike the right balance. You do want to share that you are, that's what you do, that's what you work in. But you also don't want to go too far, where you start alienating people and and scaring them off from wanting to interact with you. I had this conversation with someone the other day. Imagine if a lawyer or an accountant posted like a lot of commercial brokers do. Just did this tax return, just finished this tax return, everybody would be so disgusted by to be the worst thing to be following, and that's what we do. So I think you got to communicate, use it as a platform to share stories or anecdotes or things that are working, but don't, don't be too aggressive, where all of your content is just the new listings, just sold, just leased. But find a happy balance, and what I still find works better than any social media for that regard, is just one on one conversations, reaching out to your network, having a five or 10 minute conversation, just asking them what they're doing, what they're up to, if they've heard of anybody that's looking to buy or sell, and just having a regular conversation once a quarter, once a year, just any interval, really. But just that, one on one communication is a lot more personal than just putting on a generic post on LinkedIn about a new listing that you got? Yeah,
Tyler Cauble 3:24
I couldn't agree more. I was having a conversation with Logan Freeman earlier today because we're doing a webinar tomorrow night. And he was like, you know, oh, sorry, you know, he was calling me back. And he was like, I just walked out of meeting guy that owns 32 acres. He's wanted to subdivide some land. And I was like, Logan, how are you? How are you finding these guys? He's like, Oh, they just find me through LinkedIn, because I tell the stories about what you know, other successful clients that I've worked with. That's all it takes. Like, just tell the stories, right? And I know if you're first getting started, obviously you don't have that story to tell, but borrow somebody else's track record, right? If you're partnered up with a with a senior guy, borrow their track record, you are more than welcome to do that, as long as you have that seniors approval. And they're probably going to want you to do that too anyway, right? So they can tap into your network as well. Jesse, speaking of LinkedIn, you're pretty strong on that. You've got a podcast. You've done the YouTube stuff as well. I mean, how do you go about after having been in the business for as many years as you have, how do you go about reintroducing yourself to your network in order to stay top of mind or to get that additional referral business?
Speaker 2 4:37
Well, on your theme, I'll paraphrase here of kind of riding older guys or gals coattails. I had Bob knackle back on my podcast. And for those that don't know, he's a pretty well known broker in New York, and he's probably about twice my age. And I asked him, I'm like, you know, what do you do to stay relevant? And in terms of business development, what are you do? Doing, are you? I see that you're active even with newer technology. A bit, he said something that we kind of all know intuitively. He's, he basically said, there's no shortcut. You have to be on everything. And he just said, you know if, if you're going to be on LinkedIn, you have to be doing that. If you're you have to be doing the phone calls. You have to be engaging with artificial intelligence and utilizing technology, maybe email campaign outreach, and basically saying that you just you have to have every cylinder you can possibly have, firing, firing. So I think part of that is to what we're talking about here, reintroducing yourself to your network in terms of referral business. Specifically, there's you can always look back and we do it once. We should do it every year, but we do it probably once every two, three years, where we look at what we call our sleeping folder, and it's just, we call it that because it says Z said, and it's just old deals that we've done, that we've completed, that, you know, are kind of now in a miscellaneous folder, because we don't actively look into it, but we go through that, and we either contact them to see where they're at in terms of their expiries, if they're looking for real estate, if they're all set where they're currently at, and then ultimately, we ask for referrals. And one thing, there's a gentleman in my firm years ago, he said something that, again, sounds so simple, but he said so many people say, you know, if you know somebody looking for real estate, or if you know somebody that you know is in the industrial space, and that's the last thing you want to do, nobody responds to that. But if you say specifically and ask, say, Do you know anybody that you think would benefit from XYZ, and be specific about it and ask for the referral. Don't just say offhand, you know, if you know somebody, because those are the ones that people don't call you because they don't think about it, doesn't actively put them in a position to think who could actually benefit from it. So that's kind of my two cents.
Tyler Cauble 6:55
Yeah, I learned from BNI business networking International, I was a business networking group I was a part of for a few years when I was first getting started, really, how to put together a 45 second pitch that gets 3040 other people in the room interested in what you're doing. And I think that goes hand in hand with that, right? Because, you know, you don't want to just be the person that stands up and does a 42nd ad every week, right? That wasn't entertaining. What was always entertaining to me were the business owners that would stand up and they would say, a client had this problem. Can you believe that? Or that's a very common theme, whatever it is, right? Here's the problem that this client was having. We came in, and here's how we solved it. If you know anybody that has this problem, have them give me a call. I was like, Man, that's so like, it's almost counterintuitive, right? Because you get hyper specific, you get hyper niche into one thing, but it stays more top of mind, right? If you just say hey, if you know anybody wanting real estate, call me. Okay, whatever. Hey, if you know anybody wanting to buy self storage facilities within you know, these three zip codes on Thursday. Let me know, you know what I mean. Like, it just gets ridiculously specific. You're like, that sticks with you. You know,
Speaker 2 8:09
you know what? It's also, just going to say it's also, it kind of reminded me of a pain point, kind of angle. We had a landlord in our area bought this property. The additional rent went up something like 15% with the new ownership. And it completely honest. My honest point of view was the additional rent was way too low for so long. But it doesn't matter if you call somebody and say, like, listen, I noticed, you know, the landlords, you know, I've talked to a few different tenants, that the additional rent has increased, you know, is this, is this something you're dealing with? Is it worth having a five minute conversation. And of course, you go in with a paint from that, you know, feeling of pain and or touching on a pain point, people respond to it, and, you know, more likely to engage or even refer somebody else that is in the same boat.
Tyler Cauble 8:53
Yeah, I love it. We got a couple of questions coming in. Doug is saying, What about owners who try to lease or sell themselves. Doug, if you could give me a little bit more context on what your actual question is there, we could give you the right advice would be super helpful. I don't know if you're an owner, or if you're a broker, or if you're a broker trying to pitch an owner who's trying to do this all themselves. Let us know we'd be happy to dive into that. Travis is saying, is there enough money in commercial property management to stand alone, separate from brokerage? Absolutely. Travis, yeah. I mean, I've got a commercial property management company. It completely stands on its own, has its own P and L and I mean, it's a profitable company on its own. So if you're just looking to do commercial property management, you don't want to do the brokerage side of things. Absolutely. I would encourage you, though, to start looking at lease renewals, and you know, construction management as part of that, because the hardest part is getting the property to manage everything after that is just gravy on the cake. Um, earlier we mentioned getting hyper niche right, and I think that being hyper low. Pool and farming with intent is a pretty great way to land a listing right that means dialing in on on the right buildings, the right corridors, the right zones, depending on how you want to kind of niche down your area, and then going out and door knocking, cold, calling everybody or or even utilizing direct mail in these areas, because that's kind of what I did within my market, right? I became known as the East Nashville commercial real estate guy. So if you are doing anything in East Nashville, you're probably calling me Chad. What's, what's your process for selecting the right industrial parks or corridors or areas to farm and, you know, reach out to
Speaker 1 10:43
yeah, this will vary Market to Market. And the city that I'm in has a aggregate inventory of about 160 million square feet. So put that in context, market like Chicago has a billion square feet, Toronto has about a billion square feet, Inland Empire and LA is about 2 billion square feet, so I'm able to actually keep on top for the most part. There's still things that slip through, but I'm able to keep track of 160 million square feet a lot easier than someone could keep track of a billion square feet. Or if someone were to look in Texas and they said, Well, I'm going to do every major city in Texas, and now you're in the five 6 million square foot range. It's it's just impossible, in my mind. So I think you have to be really realistic on how much you can actually track and keep on top of before you start losing that edge of having competitive advantage for information out of people don't have. So I think that that's key. There's also a lot of different strategies out there. One thing I still do is I still try to call fellow SIRs all across North America just to be the inbound source if they have a lead coming into my city. So even though that's not directly in my market, I just want to keep that pipeline of information flowing. So that's still something that I do on a week to week basis, but I still also focus heavily on on the market, and keep it on top of options that come available and and different things that are moving and changing. So I think you really have to be realistic on how big your market is, where you can specialize and really just become an expert, because that's that's the one thing that we offer, over and above any other profession. Your lawyer is never going to be able to understand every deal that's happening in the market. Your accountants not going to be able to understand it, and if they do understand it, you need a different lawyer and a different accountant, because they're not specializing in what they should be. That's something that we can legitimately offers a value add service is just having access to information that no one else does. So be realistic with how large or how small of a Geograph, geographical area you can cover and just commit to knowing everything about it.
Tyler Cauble 12:55
Yeah, that's when I first started working in East Nashville. I went and walked almost, I mean, every single commercial street. I think it's that important, right? Because I wanted to be the expert in this area, and I forgot who it was who told me this. But at any given time, about 5% of buildings in your neighborhood, in your market, are interested in, at least considering trading, right? So if you've got 1000 commercial properties in your market at any given time, 50 of those buildings will probably will entertain an offer. That doesn't mean that they'll sell, but 50 will consider selling. So it's like you don't really need much more than 1000 properties to really farm to make a great career. I mean, most, most of my years, I think we've sold somewhere between 20 and 30 buildings, right? There's a lot more leases other than that. But, I mean, if you sell 20 to 30 buildings a year, you're gonna be doing really, really well. Jesse talking about getting creative on you know, your marketing fraud. Have you had success with mailers or any other local you know, campaign targeting office building owners and if so, like, what? What messaging do you kind of tend to use, or what works best? Yeah,
Speaker 2 14:13
so with our markets, not so much on the office side. We have an apartment group here that specifically, I mean, they love mailers, and it's just because it caters to a different group of individuals. So for instance, a number of the apartment owners in our area, they're not really, you know, they're older in age, they're, they're depending on the building. Obviously, they're not as corporate as on as the office side. A lot of times, the only thing you have is maybe an email, but probably not, and you've got a phone number and address, and it's really one of the only ways to reach out to them. And we've had success with mailers, in that sense, if we've gone into office buildings that are more B and C Class office. Buildings. There's been a bit of success doing that, but for the most part, the office market has gotten it's, you know, become so corporate that the reality is, you're not necessarily even dealing with an owner who, you know, sign a purchase and sale agreement. You're dealing with a larger corporation that owns probably multiple buildings. So I think we've, you know, maybe before my time, mailers were more popular on the office world. I know, for you know, I know they there's still a thing in real estate, in a commercial real estate, but I don't see it so much on the office, on the office end, yeah,
Tyler Cauble 15:36
I would imagine it depends on scale too, right? Because, you know, retail, same thing, industrial, same thing. You're probably not gonna and, you know, that's that's also a testament to how big it deals. Jesse's working on up in Toronto, yeah, he's like, Oh yeah, we could, we could never mail our clients.
Speaker 2 15:55
I honestly, I would love, I would love to have a direct line to some of these guys houses and just cut out the cut out the middleman. But I think it's also different industrial, even at large scale. And industrial, a lot of times you still have a user, you know, that's, that's an owner, user, where for us, I would, you know, it would be interesting to actually plot out, you know, in Toronto, which would be similar, I'm assuming, to most major cities in the States, of what ownership is, corporate versus, like, pure private. Like, you're going to be private and still be a massive company, but like, you know, like us, us, us. For here we, you know, we buy an office building together. You know, somebody can get a hold of us, whereas right now, because the the market, it's just, especially in Canada, for those that don't know, in Toronto, the majority of the office buildings, the larger ones, are owned by pension funds. REITs make up a portion of that too, but it's banks and pension funds, you know, the predominant ownership when it comes to larger scale offices down here. Yeah,
Tyler Cauble 16:57
that's it's a totally different beast, right? And you know, they're probably changing over who's handling the real estate a little too frequently, compared to some of the smaller groups, right, where you're actually dealing with an owner, and so you can consistently maintain a relationship. Our third point and final point, and I know this is going to be being a dead horse, right? So we're talking about the three fastest ways to get your first commercial list, and we covered leveraging your network, hyper local farming. You guys have heard us talk about this before, but I can't reiterate how important it is that you are going out and you're positioning yourself as an expert online. It doesn't matter if it's LinkedIn, it doesn't matter if it's a podcast, it doesn't matter if it's a blog, or what you're doing. If the people you are trying to do business with have never heard of you or have no way to hear about you, you're already behind, right? I mean, Chad was the one that, you know, originally told me back in the day, dude, you've got to start a blog. It's, it's like, blown my business up, right? I saw Jesse doing videos with bigger pockets. And I was like, Dude, I need to start doing videos in commercial real estate. I didn't know that anybody would ever be interested in that, right? It's super important for you to get out there and do that. It's completely changed my business. And that's, you know, kind of like what I mentioned earlier. That's how Logan has so many landowners reaching out to him. He's not cold calling at all. He's just posting on LinkedIn, telling stories, and they're calling him. It's unbelievably powerful. And I love to have this conversation with these two, because they were doing all of this stuff well before I was so Chad. I mean, talk to me about like the industrial sector, what type of content performs best when you're when you're working to attract industrial clients online, right? Because, like most people are probably immediately like, Oh, you're not going to find those guys on on Instagram.
Speaker 1 18:52
I think the what I've found to be the most beneficial, and what I get the most feedback from is tangible items that people can act on. So one, here's a really good stat for warehouse and logistics companies. This is a study done a few years ago that showed that, on average, a company will spend three to 6% of all their expenses on warehouse rent. That's a really interesting step. So now, if you're a company and you're looking at that and you say, we're only spending 2% Well now there's you can show that there's an opportunity for you to have get a nicer space or get into a better location. Then you could also say to them, if you can reduce costs in your rent, does that mean that you can now increase cost? Does that mean that your cost for transportation increase or your labor costs increase? What happens if you just increase the cost of your rent marginally, but you make a sizable decrease in something like labor or transportation, and that brings your total expenses down? Something like that is just a great, tangible stat that actually shows what other companies are doing, and it allows the companies to make a baseline. So that's just one example, but it. It all comes back to what we've all preached so much on this is it has to be value. It has to be something that somebody gets from it. And I think that that's where you can turn a just listed post or a just sold post into actually something of value. So you could say we just listed this property. Here's why we listed at the price that we did. And here's what we're seeing in the market right now and why we came to the market at this price and on these terms. Or here's a property that just sold and at the price per square foot. It's noteworthy, because maybe a sudden you high watermark for for the industry. So I think just adding something of value that, because if we all put ourselves in the shoes of a company that wants to lease or buy space, or a landlord that has space to lease, the most valuable thing you can do is get insight into your asset or to what you need to rent or buy. So if you're providing information on that, that's where you start building an audience. If people are like, what this what this person is saying, is actually very helpful and very insightful, they're going to fall along with you. And as soon as soon as you start doing that, you get some credibility, you establish a bit of rapport. You've already got a little bit of a name to yourself before you perhaps reach out, or that person reaches out to you. Yeah,
Tyler Cauble 21:10
I think, like my biggest takeaway from what you just said is, don't tell them what you did, show them what you did, right? Because when you're sharing that story, it's so easy for your prospective client to then put themselves in that position and imagine if they were the ones working with you, what that would be like, right? I think that's, that's a that's a pretty powerful takeaway. Jesse, what about you? Man, I mean, on LinkedIn or social media, you know, sharing market data or market trends. You know, outside of just sharing like, hey, we closed this right? What, what works and and what actually generates leads for you?
Speaker 2 21:51
Yeah, so I just to touch on, first of all show to chat to, because, you know, the real estate news exchange is a, is a large publication in Canada for video and and articles. And I saw chat on there. I'm like, How the hell did this guy get on this thing written like this podcast on here. I'm coming from the perspective of, yeah, no disrespect. I'm coming from the perspective when I see a Canadian like in, you know, in any media, in our feet, like in our field, I'm always curious to see what the path was. He flips me the the editor. And, you know, a lot of people don't realize this, but a lot of these publications, they are content hungry. So if you're making quality content, they want to post it. It helps them. You're solving a problem for them. So that's like, just, just that aside, just touch on what Chad said. Also the when it comes to LinkedIn posts, the the when you do a deal, it's, it's like, you win it twice, right? You win the deal when you're able to have the mandate to work for somebody, but then when you close it, you win it again, in the sense that you can repost that and use that as a free advertising for you. So I think the key, and I think we've mentioned it here, but I think the key is showing what the problem was. You know, what the solution was. And I think I said it a few weeks ago when we were chatting last that I'm telling the younger brokers that you're in a position that we actually have problems we're trying to solve. You know, for tenants, seven years ago, when vacancy was two 3% you know, it was very difficult to say you're different than your peers at JLL or CBRE or whatever. Whereas now we actually can solve and do unique deals. Maybe it's an early extension, maybe it's, you know, renewal, that you take on more space, but you do it at today's rates and blend them into the back end, just stuff that's creative. So you can utilize deals that you've done and just make it you know, like you said, there's a balance of not giving enough information and giving too much. But the post that I still read today, even though we're in the industry, are the ones from my peers that will say, you know, here's a unique thing we did to get this deal done. So I think that's that's key, utilize what you already have in your pipeline. You did the hard work of getting the deal and finishing it. You might as well advertise it and try to drum up some more business.
Tyler Cauble 24:10
Yeah, put that case study together, right? What was the I mean, look at it like a three act play. You know? What was the drama? Because I have, I mean, maybe if somebody out there has deals that are going smoothly and there's no drama in your deals, like come hang out with me, Chad and Jesse, we want to interview you. We want to talk about this and figure out what the hell you're doing. There's always a story to tell from every single deal, even if you think it's boring. There's there's something there, I promise you. So there you have it. The three fastest ways to get your first commercial listing, leverage your network. Get out there and make sure that everybody knows what you're doing. Hyper local farming with intent. Get out there, pick your market. Make sure everybody in that market knows exactly who you are and why they should call you. And then, of course, we'll beat this dead horse forever and always. Position your. Yourself as the expert online. Jesse Chad, thanks for joining me today, guys. If you haven't heard Chad has recently released a book industrialize. It's on Amazon. Go get it. It is basically, you know, what is it? The the the ultimate guide to industrial real estate, Chad, is that what you're calling it The Insider's Guide, the Insider's Guide, the Insider's Guide to industrial real estate. And it's a lot of information. I just bought 20 of them, so be giving those away. Go check them out. Appreciate you guys as always, and we'll see y'all in the next one. This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way, go to www dot cre central.com, to learn more you.
In this episode, we break down the top three fastest ways to land your first commercial real estate listing—whether you’re transitioning from residential, starting out in CRE, or hitting the reset button. Join Chad (Industrial), Jesse (Office), and Adam (Retail) as they each share practical, sector-specific strategies that helped them build early traction and credibility.