How to market and sell your commercial property investment

What you need is a strategy to make absolutely sure you obtain the best possible price when you sell.

And you do this by creatively targeting investors, developers and potential owner-occupiers — through adopting a broad (yet cost-effective) marketing campaign, which draws out those buyers best suited to your property.

Choosing the best method of sale

The number-one secret for successfully selling any property is to promote the feeling among your prospective buyers that "they could miss out".

However, this is difficult to achieve with a straight private sale. In fact, this method generally takes far longer to achieve a result — as it fails to create any sense of urgency in a buyer's mind.

Plus, you are at a real disadvantage in having to nominate an asking price. Traditionally, you need to inflate this figure to allow for the expected level of negotiation. But that becomes a double-edged sword.

You could effectively deter potential buyers because your figure is considered to be too high. Or it could go the other way — you may end up selling at a figure below what buyers may have been prepared to pay, simply because your buyers were not put under any competitive pressure.

For my clients, I recommend either a public auction or tender as the most appropriate method of sale.

That way, prospective buyers are all heading towards a fixed end-date and there is no need for you to publicly nominate an actual selling price — so you maintain control all the way through.

How to market your property

As you'll appreciate, media advertising can be very costly. And there is also a limit to just how much you can actually say about the property in any one advertisement.

So the best approach has been to link the media ads to dedicated web pages for each property, which has proven extremely successful.

You will find most agents simply choose to place their properties onto the internet in a rather generic form using portal sites like realcommercial.com.au or commercialrealestate.com.au.

But this creates a problem for you, in that every buyer for your property needs to go through a lengthy search process on one or more of these portal sites.

And what's even worse (for you as a vendor) is that these buyers will probably discover several other properties they prefer along the way!

Bottom line: What works best is to create a dedicated website (or least several web pages) for your property. And then promote that specific web address via the media ads, the brochure and the board.

That means prospective buyers are able to home in on your property to view and download everything about it. And probably do this after hours, when your agent is actually closed.

Chris Lang is an advisor to commercial property investors and gives keynote speeches and regular seminars on the best way to invest in commercial property. He maintains a blog, his-best.biz, which he updates regularly about the best way to get the most out of your commercial property investment.