How to Get More Commercial Real Estate Listings in 2026

Getting listings is the fundamental challenge in commercial real estate brokerage. You can be the sharpest negotiator, the best marketer, and the most knowledgeable broker in your market - but none of that matters if you don't have the inventory to work with. Listings are the raw material of every CRE career.

The brokers who consistently win listings in competitive markets aren't just better at pitching. They're better at prospecting, better at timing, and better at positioning themselves before a property ever comes to market. This guide breaks down how to get more commercial real estate listings in 2026 - practical strategies that work in the current environment.

The Listing Mindset Shift

Most brokers think about listings as something that happens when an owner decides they want to sell or lease a property. They wait for the moment an owner is ready, then compete against every other broker who also learned that a property might be coming to market.

The brokers who consistently win listings operate differently. They position themselves as the obvious choice before the owner makes a decision. They're already in the owner's mind - or inbox - when the timing becomes right. By the time the owner picks up the phone to explore the idea, there's often only one name they're thinking of.

The shift from reactive to proactive is the single most important change a CRE broker can make in their business development approach.

1. Prospect Before Properties Come to Market

The easiest listings to win are ones you created - deals where you identified a property with listing potential, reached out to the owner before anyone else, and built enough of a relationship that you became their natural choice when they decided to move.

Identify Properties with Listing Potential

Use property data to find owners who are likely approaching a decision point:

• Long hold periods: Owners who have held a property for 10+ years are statistically more likely to be considering a sale than recent buyers. Look for properties that haven't traded in a decade.
• Near-term lease expirations: Single-tenant properties with leases expiring in 12–24 months create natural decision points for owners - renew, reposition, or sell. These are high-conviction listing prospects.
• Estate or trust ownership: Properties held in estates or by older individuals are more likely to trade. County recorder data often reveals ownership entity type.
• Out-of-area ownership: Owners who live far from the market often manage properties at arm's length and may be more open to liquidating than local owners who are more engaged.

Reach Out Early

Once you've identified potential listing prospects, reach out before there's any urgency on their side. An early, low-pressure conversation - "I've been tracking your submarket closely and wanted to share some recent activity I thought would be relevant" - sets the stage for a relationship long before they're ready to list.

This kind of outreach requires consistency. Reaching out once and moving on if you don't hear back is not a strategy. Building a pipeline of 50–100 owner prospects and staying in regular contact over months is a strategy.

2. Build a Dominant Presence in Your Submarket

Listing assignments often come down to credibility: when an owner decides to list, they pick the broker they believe is most likely to get the best result. That belief is largely driven by market presence and recent transactions.

Own Your Transaction History

Every deal you close in a submarket is marketing. Send deal announcements to nearby owners. Post closings on LinkedIn with market context. Build a track record that's visible and specific to the market you want to dominate. An owner who has received your deal announcements three times in two years knows you're active in their market before you ever call.

Produce Market Intelligence

Owners value brokers who help them understand their asset's value in the context of current market conditions. Produce regular, genuinely useful market updates - not generic fluff, but specific data about what's happening in their submarket: recent transactions, vacancy trends, tenant demand, capital availability.

Distribute these updates via email to your owner prospect list. Over time, you become associated with market knowledge - which is exactly the positioning that wins listing pitches.

Publish Content That Demonstrates Expertise

In 2026, content marketing is increasingly important for CRE brokers. Owners and investors do their own research before engaging a broker. A broker who has written thoughtful, useful pieces about the submarkets they cover shows up in those searches and demonstrates expertise before any direct conversation happens.

3. Systematize Your Owner Outreach

The gap between knowing you should prospect and actually doing it consistently is usually a systems problem. Most brokers prospect in bursts - aggressively when they have no listings, then not at all when they get busy. The result is a feast-or-famine pipeline that never stabilizes.

The fix is a systematic outreach process that runs regardless of how busy you are:

• Maintain a defined target list. Know exactly which owners you're trying to reach. Keep it in a CRM or outreach platform where it's visible and actionable.
• Set a weekly outreach cadence. How many new owners will you contact this week? How many follow-ups will you send? Lock in the numbers and treat them like client commitments.
• Automate the administrative layer. The part of outreach that kills consistency is the manual work: writing individual emails, tracking who you've contacted, managing follow-up timing. Tools that automate this layer free you to focus on the conversations that actually move deals forward.

MogulAim was built specifically to handle this for CRE brokers - managing personalized outreach sequences, follow-up timing, and engagement tracking so your prospecting runs consistently even when you're deep in a transaction.

4. Leverage Your Existing Network More Effectively

Not all listings come from cold outreach. Many come from your existing network - past clients, referral partners, and people who know you. The question is whether you're staying top-of-mind with that network or letting those relationships go dormant between deals.

Past Clients

A broker who sold or leased a property for someone five years ago has a significant advantage when that owner makes their next move - if they've stayed in contact. Regular, non-transactional touchpoints (market updates, relevant news, the occasional check-in) keep you present without being pushy. Set calendar reminders or CRM automation to reach out to past clients at regular intervals.

Referral Partners

Commercial real estate attorneys, property managers, lenders, accountants, and other professionals often have early visibility into owners considering a transaction. Building genuine relationships with referral partners - not just adding them to your LinkedIn network - creates a steady flow of inbound leads that doesn't require cold outreach to generate.

5. Respond to Market Signals

The best timing to reach an owner prospect is when something is happening in their world. Market signals that indicate an owner might be approaching a decision include:

• A nearby property recently sold (especially at a high price - now is a good time to discuss their asset's current value)
• A major tenant in their building or submarket announcing a relocation, expansion, or contraction
• A significant change in financing conditions that affects their hold vs. sell calculus
• A new development being announced that will affect their submarket's fundamentals

Set up Google Alerts and CoStar notifications to catch these signals in real time. When you reach out with a specific, timely reason - "I saw the Acme Corp lease announcement and thought you'd want to know what it means for values in your submarket" - you're far more likely to get a response than with a generic introduction.

6. Win the Pitch Once You Get It

Everything above is about getting to the pitch. Once you're there, here's what separates brokers who win the mandate from those who come in second:

• Know the property better than anyone in the room. Pull every comparable. Know the lease roll. Know the capital stack. Walk the property and its immediate context. Preparation signals commitment.
• Have a specific marketing strategy, not a generic one. "We'll market your property to our extensive database" is what every broker says. Tell them exactly who the likely buyers or tenants are, how you'll reach them, and what makes your approach different.
• Present a realistic pricing opinion. The broker who gives the highest number isn't always the one who wins - and it's almost never the one who performs. Owners who've been around know what overpricing costs them. Be honest, be data-backed, and explain your reasoning.

Listings go to the broker who was already in the room when the decision was made - not the one who showed up after it was made.

The Bottom Line

Getting more commercial real estate listings in 2026 requires a combination of proactive prospecting, consistent market presence, systematic follow-up, and responsive outreach when market signals present themselves. No single tactic is sufficient - but the brokers who execute across all of these dimensions build a pipeline that generates listings consistently, not just occasionally.

If you're ready to bring more structure and consistency to your owner outreach, Try MogulAim free. It's the AI-powered platform built specifically for CRE brokers who want to turn systematic prospecting into a reliable listing engine.