Matt McLennan with Kidder Mathews talks about how he got into real estate and why he chose commercial real estate as his specialty. Matt discusses the situation in commercial real estate at the moment. Matt describes the systems that he uses and how these help him scale his business. Matt also describes the payment structure in commercial real estate and points out how different it is from the residential real estate payment structure. Matt also talks about the impact of AI in commercial real estate and the importance of utilizing it.

Check out Matt’s profile on LinkedIn.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Matt McLennan can be reached at 425.417.9566 and matt.mclennan@kidder.com.

This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
Have you ever thought about adding commercial into your business? We’re going to talk about that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and hosted the show and I have said that exact intro over 500 times. And I just wanted to say thank you to everyone listening right now because you’re the reason why we made it to 500 episodes. Also, please, please support our sponsors. They also help pay the freight that gets us to allow to have a staff and continue to produce these episodes. So please support the sponsors. Tell a friend about the show. And as always, please keep listening and let us know what you think of the show. If you want to leave us a review on whatever podcast app you may be listening or watching on now. Please do that we read every review and take your suggestions very seriously, because we’re always looking to improve and do a better job for you. But my guest today is Matt McLennan. He’s a commercial agent and he’s going to tell you everything that residential agents don’t know about what commercial agents do so let’s get right to the main event, my conversation with Matt McLennan.

Today on the show our guest is Matt McLennan hitter Matthews in the Puget Sound area of Washington State. Let me tell you more about Matt. Matt McLennan specializes in industrial leasing and sales in South King and pierce counties in Washington. Since joining Kidder Mathews Matt has facilitated this is incredible over two and a half million square feet of sale and lease transactions with total consideration exceeding 250 million. He received Kidder Mathews big hitter award in 2021 and 2022, a coveted recognition given to the company’s top annual producers, we are going to have a link to Matt’s page on kiter.com, which is for Kinder Matthews. And also please follow him on LinkedIn, Matt McLennan, we will have a link directly to his LinkedIn profile. And you can see what he is all about there. But Matt, welcome to the show. So excited to have you. Thank

Matt McLennan 3:41
you for having me. I’m excited to be here. You have a great show here. I’ve been a longtime follower, so I feel honored to be able to get on.

D.J. Paris 3:49
Well, I am honored that you are here because we we never we never talked about commercial. And so I love that you’re here. And it’s funny, we actually we do get pitched a lot for from commercial agents, but commercial is so vast. And you know, you know, and I know there’s so many different sectors. So I really what I’d love to do today, at some point is really give our audience who are mostly residential agents, a better understanding of what is a commercial broker? Do you know specifically what do you do? Because obviously, there may be some opportunities there for our, our audience to maybe interact with you and pass business over. And really just get a better sense of the commercial world. I think it’s very mysterious. I live here in Chicago. We have a ton of commercial firms here. And I know people who work at those firms and I’m still a little confused about how it all works. My brother in law is a commercial agent down in Florida. I’m confused at what he does. So it’s I would love to demystify it a little bit to give our audience better awareness so that they can they can you know, better help their clients when those needs come up. But let’s start at the beginning. So tell us how you got into real estate and what Why?

Matt McLennan 5:01
Great question it for me, it was very much by happenstance, I happen to be working actually for a wine distribution company. So I started off out of college and an entry level sales position and was was selling wine at a retail level wine and spirits. It was it was a big national distributor. And so I bounced around cities and territories moving, I got into some management positions. And it was it was a great job, great industry really cool. And then here in Tacoma, where I live now, I mean, it was literally hanging out with some out of outside of work, friends who happen to work for my current firm, Kidder Mathews. And so I’m just like you mentioned, I knew nothing about commercial real estate, it was very, it was very mysterious. I didn’t, I didn’t know how it worked. I don’t even know. I mean, I understood that there were commercial buildings, but I didn’t really understand that it was an industry per se. And so in hanging out on the weekends with these guys, you know, I started learning about it and understanding what the industry is. And then I saw what working in that industry could look like. And I started to look at what my goals were long term and just kind of my options and decided, hey, if now if I’m ever going to make a switch, I’m going to leave the wine industry seemingly, now is the time to do it. So I just dove right in didn’t really know a whole lot, I found somebody lucky enough to mentor me a little bit and kind of show me the ropes more or less. And, and that was really how it happened. There was no grand plan, I just fell right into it.

D.J. Paris 6:23
You know, it’s funny, I have a kind of a similar background, I was working for Anheuser Busch right out of college in St. Louis, and I was traveling around the country doing marketing things for them, and did that for a few years. And then it just got to be just, you know, too much after two years of traveling nonstop and, and wanted to I wanted to put my roots somewhere. But so and then I just sort of happenstance turned into real estate, you know, many years after that. So I, I know it’s a lot of us enter this market. But I really have so much admiration for for those that go into commercial because with residential real estate there, there’s a pretty tried and true, there’s many tried and true systems to achieve success, that are predictable, and trainable and repeatable. And I don’t know, I’m sure there are systems as well, of course, for commercial agents. But it is a much more difficult path. And in my under my understanding and experience with commercial agents, I’m always impressed because I just find that to be a totally different world and a much less predictable world. And something that I think is just you know, commercial agents really, I think don’t always get their due. Because I think it’s just incredible. I had a client once who this is a million years ago when I was a financial adviser who worked for like Marcus and Millichap, I think, or one of those firms. And I was a financial advisor anyway. And I said, Well, what do you think your salary will? Or what do you what you’ll earn this year? And she goes, Well, if I close this one deal, I’ll make two. This is 20 years ago, she said, I’ll make 250k for the year, I was like, wow, she goes, I’ve been working on it for a year and a half, it may not close. I’m like, Oh my