The Right Follow-Up Cadence for CRE Owner Outreach

Most brokers quit too early. They send one or two emails to a property owner, hear nothing back, and move on - assuming the owner isn't interested. Meanwhile, the owner is busy running their business, the emails got buried, and six months later they list with another broker who happened to call at the right moment.

Follow-up is where deals actually come from. Research across B2B sales - and CRE outreach behaves much like B2B sales - consistently shows that the majority of conversions happen after the third or fourth touchpoint. Most brokers give up before they ever get there.

But there's a wrong way to follow up. Sending "just checking in" emails every week until someone tells you to stop isn't persistence - it's spam. This guide covers how to build a follow-up cadence that keeps you present with owner prospects over months and years without burning through goodwill.

The Core Principle: Every Touchpoint Must Add Value

The difference between a broker who follows up well and one who just annoys people is simple: every message delivers something worth reading. Not just a reminder that you exist. Something the owner didn't have before - a relevant market data point, a recent comparable transaction, a change in the financing environment, or a question that prompts them to think about their property in a new way.

If you can't articulate what value a specific follow-up adds, don't send it. "Just wanted to touch base" is not a reason to email someone. "Wanted to share that the industrial vacancy rate in your submarket just dropped to 3.2% - lowest in five years, and it's affecting valuations" is a reason.

A Practical Follow-Up Timeline

Here's a cadence structure that works for cold owner outreach. Adjust the timing based on your market, the owner's level of engagement, and any signals you pick up along the way.

Day 1: Initial Outreach

Your first email is your introduction and your value proposition. Lead with something specific to their property or submarket. Keep it short - four to six sentences. End with one clear call to action: a question they can answer with a sentence, an offer to share more information, or a request for a 10-minute call.

Avoid the common mistake of making the first email too long or too comprehensive. If you answer every question before they ask, there's no reason for them to respond.

Day 5-7: First Follow-Up

A short follow-up that acknowledges they're busy and adds one new piece of information. This can be a single paragraph. Something like: "Wanted to follow up on my earlier note - also wanted to mention that [nearby comparable] just closed at a cap rate that surprised most of the market. Happy to share details if it would be useful."

This follow-up serves two purposes: it ensures the original email wasn't missed, and it adds a new reason to respond. Don't repeat the first email verbatim or apologize for following up.

Day 14-18: Second Follow-Up

By now, the owner has clearly seen at least one of your messages and chosen not to respond - or you've simply been lost in inbox noise. Either way, this follow-up should shift the angle. If the first two emails focused on market data, try a direct question about their plans for the property. If the first two were informational, this one can be more direct about offering a conversation.

Keep it brief. A two or three sentence email at this stage performs better than a long one. People are more likely to respond to something that feels easy to engage with.

Day 30-35: Third Follow-Up

At this point, you've sent three messages with no response. Some owners are genuinely not interested - and that's fine. But a significant portion are just busy or haven't had the right reason to respond yet. A month-mark follow-up that offers something specific - a free valuation opinion, a market report for their submarket, or a specific question about their property - often gets the first response from owners who have been watching your messages accumulate.

Monthly Thereafter: Long-Term Nurture

After your initial sequence, drop to a monthly or every-six-weeks cadence for owners who haven't responded. These touchpoints should be low-pressure and genuinely informational: a market update, a deal announcement in their submarket, a seasonal note about market conditions. The goal is to stay visible without becoming annoying.

This is the phase that most brokers skip because it feels like a lot of work for uncertain return. It's also the phase that generates the most off-market deals. Owners who receive consistent, non-pushy updates from a broker over 12 to 18 months will often reach out when they're finally ready to move, because you're the only broker they feel like they have a relationship with.

Channel Mix: Email, Phone, and Direct Mail

A follow-up cadence that uses only email leaves responses on the table. Different owners prefer different channels, and multi-channel outreach ensures you're reaching people in the medium where they're most likely to engage.

Email

Email is the foundation of most CRE outreach because it's scalable, trackable, and non-intrusive. It respects the owner's time in a way that a phone call doesn't. It also creates a documented record of your outreach that becomes useful context when you eventually have a conversation.

Phone

Cold calls in CRE have lower success rates than most brokers would like, but they're not useless. A well-timed call after an email sequence has established some context - especially one that references the emails you've sent - is far more effective than a cold call with no prior contact. Use phone calls strategically: after you've sent at least two emails, and with a specific reason to call beyond "just checking in."

Direct Mail

For high-value targets, a physical piece of mail cuts through inbox noise in a way that email can't. A brief, professionally formatted letter or a relevant market report sent via mail signals that you've invested real effort in the outreach. Use direct mail selectively - for property owners whose assets represent significant potential commission, or for targets who haven't responded to digital outreach over several months.

When to Stop

If an owner explicitly asks you to stop contacting them, stop immediately and remove them from your outreach list. This is both a legal requirement under CAN-SPAM and a basic matter of respect. Beyond explicit opt-outs, use your judgment: if an owner has received six or more well-spaced outreach attempts with no engagement signal of any kind, it may be worth pausing their sequence and revisiting in six to twelve months when market conditions may have changed.

Persistence and harassment are different things. The line between them is: are you offering genuine value each time you reach out, and are you giving the owner enough time between touchpoints to process and respond? If yes, staying in contact for months or years is appropriate in CRE prospecting. If you're emailing every few days with nothing new to say, that's not a cadence - it's noise.

Tracking Engagement Signals

When you're running outreach at any meaningful volume, tracking which owners are engaging with your emails - even silently - helps you prioritize your follow-up energy. An owner who opened your last three emails but hasn't responded is a very different prospect than one who hasn't opened anything. Email tracking tools let you see open activity, which gives you a signal about interest level even before anyone replies.

An owner who keeps opening your emails is telling you something. They're interested - they just haven't found the right reason to respond yet. Keep showing up with better reasons.

When you see consistent open activity from an owner who hasn't replied, that's the moment to try a different approach: a phone call, a more direct question in the next email, or a personalized note that references something specific to their property situation.

Automate the Sequence, Personalize the Content

Running a multi-touch follow-up cadence across hundreds of owner contacts manually is not realistic. The brokers who execute this consistently use platforms that automate the timing and sequencing of outreach while allowing them to personalize the content for each owner.

MogulAim handles exactly this for CRE brokers - automating follow-up sequences, tracking engagement, and surfacing the owners who are most likely to be approaching a decision point. The goal is to keep your name in front of the right owners, consistently and professionally, so that when their timing changes, yours is the call they make.

Follow-up isn't aggressive. It's what separates brokers who build a sustainable prospecting pipeline from those who start from zero every quarter. The cadence that converts isn't complicated - it's consistent, value-driven, and patient. That combination wins more listings than any single brilliant cold email ever will.