Early in my career I did what most brokers do. I made calls, I pitched, I tried to get in front of as many owners as possible and convince them to list with me. It worked well enough but something about it never sat right with me.
The problem was not the prospecting. The problem was that every conversation I was having was designed to get something out of the person on the other end and owners could feel that. They have been pitched by enough brokers to know exactly what is happening the moment you call them. Their guard goes up before you finish your first sentence.
I kept thinking there had to be a better way to build this business and eventually I figured out what it was.
Give the Value First
The shift was simple in concept and completely different in practice. Instead of calling owners to pitch them, I started calling owners to help them. I would pull the numbers on their building, look at what their rents were relative to the market, get a sense of what the asset was worth and how it was performing, and then have a real conversation about what I was seeing. With no agenda and no ask at the end. Just useful information from someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
The response was completely different. Owners who had hung up on brokers a hundred times would agree to a meeting with me because someone was finally talking to them about their building instead of talking to them about a transaction.
Some of those conversations led to listings right away. Most of them did not. But what they did was build something that a cold pitch never could. Trust.
Why Trust Is the Only Thing That Compounds
I have watched brokers grind out deals through sheer volume of calls and pressure. It works in the short term. But the owners they close that way rarely refer them to anyone. They got sold, not served, and somewhere in the back of their mind they know it.
The owners I have built real relationships with work completely differently. They call me before they make any decision about their building. They send me their friends, their family members, their business partners who own properties. I have gotten listings from attorneys, CPAs and banks who refer their clients to me because they trust that I am going to give those clients honest advice. That does not happen because I pitched someone. It happens because over time I built a reputation for being straight with people.
That reputation is the asset I am most proud of in this business. It took years to build and it keeps paying off in ways that no cold call ever could.
What the Model Actually Looks Like
Today every owner I sit down with gets a free building performance review through our McCann Multifamily Stress Test. We go through the numbers together in real time. Rents relative to market, expense ratio, return on equity, what the asset is worth and what it is capable of producing. By the end of the session they know exactly where their building stands and what their best next steps are.
Sometimes the next step is to sell and I help them do that. Sometimes it is to hold and improve the asset for another couple of years before we revisit. Sometimes it is to refinance and put that equity to work somewhere else. Whatever the honest answer is, that is what I tell them.
I do not win every time by having the right answer. I win over time by always giving the best one I can come up with.
On the buy side we built the McCann Multifamily Matchmaker, a proprietary tool that lets us match investors to properties based on a detailed profile of exactly what they are looking for. Instead of sending buyers a generic list of whatever is available, we source properties that actually fit their criteria, including off market deals that never hit the MLS. It is a better experience for the buyer and it produces better results.
Both tools are free. They exist because I wanted to give people a reason to trust us before they ever had a reason to hire us.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out
Stop trying to close people and start trying to help them. It sounds obvious but it goes against almost everything the traditional brokerage world teaches you.
The pitch mindset is built around scarcity. You need this deal, you need it now, and you need to push hard enough to get it before someone else does. The advisor mindset is built around abundance. If you give enough people real value over a long enough period of time, the business comes back to you. Not always immediately. Not always from the person you helped directly but it always comes back.
I built this practice on that belief and I have not found a reason to change it yet.
If you own a building in Los Angeles and want a straight read on where it stands, reach out. The first conversation is always free and there is no pitch attached.
