When you’re prospecting property owners, amidst all of the other questions you’ll want to be asking them, here are two questions you’ll definitely want to discover the answers to during your phone calls with them:
- Do you have any plans to sell your property within the next year?
- Do you own any other buildings that you’d like to sell?
In addition, if you list buildings for lease, then you’ll want to adapt these two questions to handle leasing also.
The first question I mentioned can be a very good question to ask, because the owner may not be looking to do anything right now, but they may be thinking that they’d like to sell their building in maybe six months…and if this is the case, you’ll definitely want to know about this to schedule your future follow-up calls with them.
In addition, that first question can be a very good question to ask whenever an owner has answered the phone, and they just want to end the conversation with you immediately. So in this situation, you could say something similar to, “Sir, I respect your time, and I have just one question before you go: Do you plan on selling any property within the next year?”
Because if you’re pursuing sale listings, this is what you really want to know, isn’t it? And asking them this question in the moment gives you one final chance at determining whether or not this owner has a future need that you’ll want to be following-up on.
Then the second question is geared towards opening the owner up towards talking about any other properties that they might own, that you might not know about. Oftentimes when you’re calling an owner, you’re calling them about one specific property that they own, but they may own other properties that they’re interested in selling.
As a perfect example of this, I was interviewing a young broker about his approach to prospecting, and he told me the following true story…
He was calling an owner about a fast-food (QSR) property that the person owned, and when he asked the owner if he was interested in selling the property, the owner said, “No.” But then the broker asked, “Do you own any other properties that you’d be interested in selling?”, and the owner then said, “Yes, I own four additional properties just like the one that you called me on, and I’d like to sell those four properties.”
Then the broker told me, “Had I not asked that question, I wouldn’t have ended-up listing those four properties.”
So in keeping this in mind, these are two questions that you may want to add to your repertoire when doing your prospecting, because they could definitely lead to you landing more new listings!
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