Let me share a story with you that just happened to two of my coaching clients who work together as a team. They landed a listing on a very desirable multifamily property in a prime ocean-side city, and they did what many brokers would then do…they sent a blast email out to their list of 3,000 investors, telling them about the property, and asking them to respond if they were interested in receiving more information about the property, including the property’s exact address.
So approximately 50 people then responded to the email blast, requesting additional information on the property, and that information was then sent to them, and very quickly these two brokers then reached a signed agreement to sell the property.
Then something quite unexpected happened…the owner of the property contacted the listing brokers, telling them that suddenly other brokers were now contacting the owner directly about the property, wanting to work directly with him.
This then indicates, in my opinion, that the chances are very high that one or more of the 50 or so investors who received the information on the property, told other brokers about the property, and those other brokers then either looked up the ownership, or called the owner from the information within the brokers’ own contact management software.
The good news for my coaching clients is that they had the listing on the building, so they were protected, but this had me think about the many commercial real estate brokers who send out email blasts about properties that are not listed, and not on the open market, but the owners have encouraged the brokers to bring in offers from buyers. In this situation, if brokers have a “mole” within their email list, meaning someone who is going to contact other brokers and tell them about this off-market deal, any broker sending the email blast is now setting themselves up to create even more competition from other brokers and other buyers for the property, and these other brokers can now go directly to the seller, and cut the broker who sent the email blast completely out of the deal!
In addition, you just never know when someone on that email list has negotiated to receive a finder’s fee, if one of the brokers they forward the property information onto successfully closes a transaction on the property.
So with this in mind, be very, very careful about who you send information to, when it relates to an off-the-market deal opportunity that you’ve now uncovered.
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