Getting referrals is something that many commercial real estate agents are often not very actively focused on, but here’s one way that you can partner-up with other people, to create a mutually beneficial business referral relationship:
What you’ll want to do is choose someone who you believe has the type of clients who could potentially become your own clients. This could be someone who owns a business, or it could be a commercial real estate attorney or a probate attorney, an accountant or a CPA, or even a loan broker or a representative for a title insurance company. Then you can make an arrangement with the person, where you will be sending individual letters out to your entire database, recommending that your people utilize this other person’s services, and the other person will be doing the same for you with their own database.
The two of you will want to work together to write the letters, so that each one of you will be happy with what is being mailed out when recommending you, and you’ll want to feel good about the exact wording of the letters that you will be sending out to your own people, when recommending the other person also.
The fact of the matter is that when you have built a good, trusting relationship with your clients, they will be more likely to become interested in working with the person who you are recommending to them, and the same will apply to the other person you’ll be partnering-up with, who will be recommending you to their own clients, too.
In addition, you could make this same arrangement with multiple referral partners also, as long as they are not in the exact same profession as another person who you are already engaged in doing this with.
So then when you’re doing this, you come into the new relationship with the credibility of the person making the referral to their own clients, which is much more powerful than contacting their people for the very first time through a cold call. In addition to this, when you’re periodically checking in with your past clients, and you ask them if they know someone who may be looking to buy, sell, or lease commercial real estate, you’ll be doing what will maximize your opportunity for gaining an even greater number of referrals from them, too.