« Older Entries

Commercial Property Agents – What Are Your Property Management Fees Today?

A real estate agent that is to be managing a commercial or retail property will need to cover operational costs and make a profit. That is where the fees charged are so important. It might sound a bit crazy, but some agencies never make a profit from commercial or retail property management; that is because they do not understand what they are really to be doing and do not set up the systems to support the special skill sets. Commercial or retail property management is quite special; the simple rules of residential real estate do not apply.

Many real estate agencies can also regard the property management service in the office as the ‘poor cousin’ to the sales and leasing division. Whilst that concept may work in residential property management, the same does not apply in and with commercial or retail property. Commercial and retail property management is just far too specialised and complex to be a ‘poor cousin’ to anything.

If you run a real estate agency and want to start a commercial property management division, then here are the basic rules:

Employ good people for the commercial and retail services you are to provide. They need intelligence and drive to specialise.

Gather the commercial and retail market knowledge and trends so you understand what is required to build your division and business.

Make sure that everyone that you employ on commercial or retail property really understands what they are doing, and get them trained to pick up on any shortcomings.

Charge reasonable fees that are reflecting the complex and special tasks of the property management job
So what are the fees for managing commercial or retail property today? To answer the question you should first find out what other agents are charging locally for the management services. You will soon see those that are ‘cheap’ with their fees; the reality is that they do not take the tasks of the job seriously. Low fees do not apply if you are a serious and professional commercial agent. In saying that, it is necessary to supply excellent services to the clients that you serve to justify your fee.

Here are some fees to consider in providing your property management services to commercial and retail property:

A base management fee should be set for managing the property on a day to day basis. That will include rent collection, income and expenditure management, tenant and lease management, and maintenance management. You should also include an allocation of time for reporting to and communicating with all the tenants and the landlord, given the demands and operation of the property.

A fee should be set for negotiating the various types of lease rent reviews when and if they fall due. Given that the rent reviews are of different types, it pays to set fees for each type. Market rent reviews are the most time consuming and should attract the higher fees.

A fee for negotiating new leases and renewals of leases with sitting tenants should be set. It is common to negotiate leases with your sitting tenants.

New leases with businesses seeking to occupy your vacant space in the property will also attract its own fee. This will be higher than the fees that you set with your sitting tenants, as more work is required.

Set an hourly fee for special tasks that are outside of normal management duties. This can be out of hour’s property attendance, court attendance, project management, and business planning or budgeting of the property once per year.
As a general observation, retail property is far more demanding on the property manager’s time given the nature of the tenancy mix and the operations of the property. Take care when setting a fee for a retail property management and give due regard to your office and staff costs.

So how much profit should you make in running your commercial or retail property management division? The answer is about 30% to 40% on top of your gross operational costs of running the division. When you know this number, setting the other fees is not a problem.

There may be other fees for you to consider in addition to the main ones above, so be aware of what the property needs in daily management, and what the local property market is doing. Do not discount your property management fees to win the business; a quality service requires a fair and reasonable fee.

Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.

Tags:

Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation

Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.

If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.

Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.

For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.

No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.

There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.

Tags: