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Tim Vi Tran 0:05
So the question was, how do you dominate your market?
Tim Vi Tran 0:11
Yeah, so it’s a very broad definition. I think really dominating the market really means when a client needs to hire a commercial real estate broker, who are they going to call? Because in reality, there’s a lot of good agents out there. There’s big companies, mid tier companies, we’re considered boutique. There’s a couple of licensed agents within our company. But what do you do to demonstrate yourself that you’re the one that they need to solve their problems, right? That’s what dominating means, whether you have a certain set of skills, whether you’ve been in business for a certain amount of time, whether you’re in an 880 corridor with industrial property, how do you show your prospects? You know, maybe they’re searching you from online resources, Yelp, Google. Maybe it’s a referral from a past client. How do you show to them that you can provide the services that they need? To me, that’s what dominating the market needs.
It doesn’t mean you take every deal, you do every deal, you drive all over town. You got to be focused. And if there’s a specific area that you are good at, then that’s, to me, is how you dominate the market. So what we do is look different. You know, we don’t start out with a cold call list. We don’t go out and buy a list. What we do is we define a position in our market, and that starts with branding, right? It starts with who you are, what you’ve done in the past, and who, how are you going to help people?
So the question earlier, Joanne, you know, asked, How are you using AI to do all this stuff. Well, the last few calls that we’ve gotten were directly from people who found us on ChatGPT. Names, even the name of the top commercial real estate broker in Fremont, and our name came up on top. So we don’t start off with a list. We bring people to us, meaning, through marketing, through branding, through case studies that we do, blogs that we write, LinkedIn posts, all the stuff that on our website is all SEOed, highly SEOed, even every single property that we put on the market, we SEO that property – “is a commercial property, 10,000 square foot, facing Fremont, around transportation”. So by doing all that, AI is pretty darn smart these days. It takes all this information from all these different sources. And when you go ask the question, who’s the top commercial real estate agent in Fremont, we’re number one. So we bring the people to call us.
We don’t call them because it’s never worked for me. I’ve never called, you know, 100 people from a list of 2000 people that I purchased. We just don’t do that. So when they call us, these people have already vetted us out because they’ve read our blogs, they looked at our case studies, and they do. They’ve done whatever they’ve done. So by the time they call us, it’s not a sales call. It’s not about who are you, how long have you been in business? They’ve already done all that research. It’s about, hey, “I’m getting a divorce.” “There’s a death in the family. I have no idea what to do. I need to sell these properties.” So we get into the conversation, and we pick specific samples and case studies that we’ve closed on and said, “This is what I’ve done in this particular case. This is how we had helped these clients solve their problems. This is the solution. This is a cap. This is how long it’s going to take,” right. So it’s, it generates a different set of conversations.
You know, I don’t need to tell them who I am most of the time, they already know, right? So it’s a little different than what I used to do when I first started. I did do a lot of cold calls. Nothing wrong with cold calls. I still do cold calls, but it’s very limited, right? By the time people call us, either through postcards or whatever, they kind of already know who we are and what we’re capable of.
Yeah, I’m actually pretty active on social media. Some of you are friends of mine on LinkedIn and Facebook and things like that. We do social media not to generate a client. That’s not really the purpose. The purpose really is to brand yourself, to be out there, to be known, right? And yes, I’ve gotten deals from people who’ve reached out to me on Facebook and LinkedIn, but that’s not the primary source of our clients. Social media is really a long term game, and whether you like it or not, or believe it or not, that’s just the nature of how things work, right? Because of AI.
So we put, we put ourselves on social media because it’s important to stay relevant, to be seen. A lot of the things we do community service. When I was single, before I had kids and wife, I used to go on network and shook people’s hand five days a week that I had the time. And that’s 20 years ago, and that’s still paying dividends, right. So social media is not an all, you know, out kind of thing, I’m on your, you know, email list, Joey and and I don’t do, you know, multifamily, but I read your newsletter because I want to understand what’s going on, right? So that helps, you know, postcards helps. What we find is thank you Letters works even better.
There’s a company called Scribe, and they literally, purposely, will generate a postcard looking like letter. It’s a real envelope, first class stamp, and it’s not just a flyer where, you know, you open it up and all the information is there. It forces people to open it because it’s like, Oh, this guy just sent me a little thank you card. Well, it is a thank you card, and inside a thank you card, very short paragraph, “I’m Tim Tran, I’m interested, I’m interested in buying a property.” I’m actually an investor myself as well. Or “I have a client, you know, is looking in Hayward, and 10,000 square foot property fits their profile,” and we track them.
You know, you can set up a Google number, for example, and we’ll do like an A-B test, right. So we send them out a thank you card. They’ll open it and then call you if we happen to miss the call. We know that they call based on this marketing piece, whether it’s a or b, and then that gets recorded and we call them back, right? That works beautifully. Check out Scribe. And my guy, Diego, when he was working with me as a marketing person, before he became a real estate guy, he helped us find this company. And even the way they write the letters, it looks like it’s handwritten, right? So, so the likely chance of having that letter open is very high. We usually send out, you know, maybe 500 to 1000 of these. And the last time we did that, we sent out, I think, 1000 thank you letters. We got like, maybe 20 calls. And out of the 20 calls, we ended up with, you know, maybe 10 or 12 conversations, a couple of presentation listings, and we actually ended up getting two listings out of that. So it does work. It’s a little bit more expensive. And you know, we’ve tried all the other stuff to postcards and email blasts, all that stuff works to a certain degree, but definitely check out thank you letters.
A question from the audience: 7:40
Thank you. What do you do, Mr. Tran, to stay relevant with the SEOs and the blogs for branded purposes? What kind of content you’re posting out or like you said, Scribe is the way to go for one aspect, but how do you continue to be the visible agent where you don’t have to do that cold calling?
Tim Vi Tran 8:04
Yeah, that’s a good question. I would say, let’s just backtrack to about two years ago. At that point, I had already been in business, maybe 22, 23 years, and I was kind of all over the place until I met Joanne from 10 Plus Brand.
The first thing we did was we went to figure out who I am, and we broke down, basically, starting from my DNA, you know, of the company, right. And she said, Okay, who are you? What do you do? Where do you, what do you, what do you want to do in the future, and how do you position yourself? And once you figure that out, then you start to put together a more comprehensive package, meaning for every piece of flyer that goes out, it’s just a certain color. Your logo is important. That’s how people find you, and when you’re consistent, it’s a lot easier for them to find you. Now, with that being said, that’s just, you know, maybe 20% of the work, right.
Well, over my 25 year period, I have closed many, many deals, hundreds of leases, and we start to to get all that stuff out of my head, you know. And we start to write up case studies, very, very detailed case studies: “Clients looking to expand. How do we do that? How do we negotiate the deal? How do we structure the deal?” So you put all that out there, as a case study, as a blog, as a video, right? Every time we do a case study, for example, we get it blasted out there in many different ways. It’s a video on YouTube, it’s a written case study posted on our website. It’s posted on LinkedIn and all the different social media platforms. And you have to keep consistent, consistently do that, because if you’re just doing, you know, one or two case study, well, you know that’s not really going to do you much.
And within the case studies, we even have themes. Like for example, the last three case studies that we’ve done was about cap rate, IRR, equity multiple, gross rent multiplier. So you’re really doing these things, number one, to demonstrate your capabilities, and then number two, you’re really educating that next client, was like, You know what, I have no idea what IRR means, and I have no idea what you know cap rate means, right. So by putting this kind of, you know, content out there, you establish yourself. And you just have to keep doing it over and over again. Luckily for me, I have the budget to outsource all that out. When I used to do it myself, I’ll get around to it when I get around to it, which is never! Now, I’ve got a VA in the Philippines because she helps do like these closing announcements, little one pager with a QR code. I have my writer, I have my person that’s just kind of pushing all this marketing content out.
Thank you. Yeah. You know, I think technology is great. It helps you do your job more efficiently. Maybe you can, you know, put in a 36 page lease and get a lease abstract from ChatGPT in under a minute, 30 seconds. Nothing wrong with that. But I think at the end, at the end of the day, commercially, commercial real estate is really, really, really, a people business, and so when I have my very first conversation with a client, they don’t know me. I don’t know them, I immediately established rapport, trust, transparency. I mean, you’ve already gone past the vetting part of it. That’s why they called you. Now they want to know, how can you help them? Help you.
So you got to have that conversation where you make them feel at ease. You let them know that you can do this deal. It’s all about your self confidence. It’s about people. And I do a lot of stuff on Zoom, but I also love meeting people, having coffee with them, shaking their hands, right, and, and I don’t know how many times I got asked this question, A client calls me: “I’m looking to sell property. I’ve already interviewed three people. Tim Tran, how are you different? What makes you special?” And here’s what I say, I’m not joking, I told the client “I’m going to return your phone call and emails.” It’s really that simple. It’s basic, basic business. You know, there’s a lot more to that. You know, set aside all the numbers and all the things you do to get to that point. People want to hear from you. They want an update. They want you to talk to them, right? It’s a people business.
So when you establish a relationship with them, you’re likely going to get that opportunity to work with them. It’s not that hard, really. You tell them what you do. You say what you’re going to do. Well, you got to do it. That’s it, you know? That’s … I have a six and a nine year old, when I tell them I’m going to do something, I’m going to take them out to the playground, and I make excuses like, oh, you know, it’s late now, they don’t like to hear that. Well, same way your client, right? You know, so you got to fulfill your obligations.
Another question from the audience 8:57
And I just wanted to know how you guys would promote like a fully leased four or five cap in a great location with the interest rates being kind of where they’re at right now.
Tim Vi Tran 9:25
So you can take that concept, multi family, let’s just assume that it’s a four unit industrial property, right. So before we even start to promote this property, we produce a listing proposal, and within that listing proposal, we’re looking at the sub market, we’re looking at key performance metrics, we’re looking at price per square foot, we’re looking at the cap rate, and all that data goes into evaluation using comps approach, income approach, in some cases, you know, developer pro forma approach. That, okay, here’s this approach that is going to give me a million dollars. Using comps, the income approach might give me 1.2 MM.
So you go, you might make a recommendation to the seller. Hey, you know you’re within a million to 1.2 MM low end, middle range, high end. Okay, this is the number that we go with. Let’s go to the market.
Then you start to highlight the specific, specific of this particular property. Are you targeting an upside, or you target an owner, user, or you target an investor, right? So you kind of go through all the scenarios. And by the way, here’s the actual numbers from 2025, here’s the pro forma. What I can do if I was an investor, but if I was an only user, hey, these two tenants that are in there, short term leases, they happen to be side by side, right? So if you want to take these two units and use it for yourself to run your business, that’s the potential, right? So that’s how I would particularly market something like that.
Questioner: That makes sense. Thank you.
And Applause. Applause.
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