How to create a powerful New Year pipeline in commercial real estate?

CRE Success Principle: Momentum in January is not magic; it is manufactured by the work you do before you switch off for the end-of-year break.

In commercial real estate, the first week back in January can feel slow. People are easing back in, and no one is even close to full flight yet. But you do not need to wait for momentum to arrive. You can manufacture it.

The New Year Stack of Leads is a simple process I use with clients to help them start the year strong. The idea is straightforward: before the holiday break, you spend one focused hour creating a series of New Year messages for clients, prospects, and past contacts. These emails sit in your outbox until the first day back. Then you hit send.

Why this works
A Happy New Year message is one of the easiest conversation starters you will ever use. It’s only natural to respond, and that response opens the door to the real conversation you want to have. It might be about an appraisal, a listing that needs fresh attention, a portfolio review, or a proposal that went quiet.

Follow up matters
The first email is only the beginning. A simple cadence of calls, emails, and texts over the following weeks helps you convert replies into real opportunities.

Prepare your team
If you are a commercial real estate principal, get your whole team involved. One hour of preparation before Christmas now can create a pipeline of opportunities waiting for them when they return.

If you want to start 2026 with clarity and momentum, this is the process to use…listen to episode 251 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership to learn exactly how to do it.

Episode transcript:

Imagine this: it's the start of 2026, and at the end of your first week back at work, you've already received a flood of emails, phone calls and messages from people who want you to come and appraise their property, from buyers who are ready to look at opportunities, and also from landlords who want you to walk them through a strategy to help them create more value in their portfolio in 2026.

This can be your reality if you take just one hour to create it before the end of the year.

This is episode 251 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak. Welcome to another episode of the show, our final episode for 2025. Really appreciate you joining us.

And today I've got something which is a process that I've shared with my clients and members, and I want to share with you as well for joining us for this last episode of the year.

It is called The New Year Stack of Leads.

And what we're trying to do with this process is rather than waiting for momentum to build throughout 2026—which can take weeks or even months, because it just takes time for momentum to build—we manufacture momentum by taking a few steps now to craft some email drafts that you put in your outbox.

They sit there over the holiday period, and then on the first day back in 2026, you then launch those emails like a series of missiles. They fire off and then something amazing happens.

People start replying to these emails. They start calling you up. They get in contact with you for reasons that you want them to, because you've taken the time to think about what is a thoughtful message that I can send to people at the start of the year that creates activity and builds momentum.

So, it's called The New Year Stack of Leads because we do it at the start of the year. The reason why we send the email in the first place is to wish people Happy New Year, right?

So, we start off with “Happy New Year,” and when you receive a message that says “Happy New Year”, it's kind of rude if you don't reply “Happy New Year” to that person, right?

And we all receive them probably up until the end of January. So, we use that Happy New Year opportunity, that's the trigger that exists to start a conversation, but it's also a Trojan horse.

The Happy New Year is the Trojan horse that then allows us to pivot to what it is that we actually want to talk about, which is going to help us build momentum starting off the new year.

So, it could be about appraising their property. It could be about providing a proposal to list their property. It could be about reviewing a proposal that we previously provided to list their property. It could be to analyze their portfolio. It could be that we need to actually review the strategy with an existing client.

Maybe there's a listing that's been gathering dust and it's getting a bit stale, and we want to just start a fresh conversation in 2026 about how we can create some more activity on that listing.

There are so many reasons why you might want to get someone in a conversation at the start of the year, and I believe the best way to open that conversation is just by saying “Happy New Year” and then talking about the thing that you want to talk about.

Now, this is a little bit different to what we were talking about in episode 248, where we talked about making sure that you have new campaigns ready to launch, and they're ones where you've actually signed the listing agreement before Christmas and you've locked in the marketing commencement campaign launch date—probably for, if you're in Australia, the 27th of January.

This is different to lining up meetings with people who have said, “Hey, let's talk in the new year,” and we actually book in the meeting in the new year.

This is different to—although it's related to—the review of your CRM that I recommended in that episode, because when you review your CRM, you're going to uncover opportunities that exist for you to open up new conversations with people.

So, this is all about starting new conversations in the new year, because when you get back and you start the new year, sometimes we're a little bit kind of like... I don't know. We are not quite active yet, right?

We've still got sand in our shoes. Maybe we've forgotten the password. You need your password to execute the New Year Stack of Leads, by the way.

But you do a little bit of work now. You write some of those emails now, and then they're ready to go—like I said, like a series of missiles. You launch them off when you get back to work, and then all this activity starts coming back to you.

So just a couple of other things about the mechanics of this. We don't just send the email with the “Happy New Year” and then the thing we want to talk about and then wait for something to happen.

We probably need to be following up, right? We've talked about cadences, which is the tempo or rhythm at which we outreach people—not just once, but we actually have a rhythm at which we follow up people through different channels over a period of time.

And for this one, I recommend that you send the New Year message via email, and then maybe a week later we call them up. We leave a voicemail. Then we send another email.

And perhaps a few days later we also send a text, and maybe finally after that we call up one more time and leave a voicemail.

So, we've had about seven touchpoints at that point, and we are really trying to elicit a response from all of these different touchpoints to get people into the conversation that we want to have with them.

So, if you are feeling like now is a little bit too late in the year to be prospecting—and maybe there's an argument to say that it is—instead of prospecting, this is something that you can do to lay the foundations for more momentum at the start of 2026.

You are prospecting, but you're just not actually hitting send yet.

So, we are creating a first week where you've got opportunities that will be waiting for you as a result of the groundwork that you've laid now.

And if you are a commercial real estate principal, rather than doing a prospecting power hour before everyone breaks up for the holiday break, you can recommend that everyone spend an hour to identify the opportunities and to start drafting a few of these emails so when they come back, there's all these opportunities that they can start working on immediately.

So that's the New Year's Stack of Leads. Give it a go. If you're looking for something to do before the end of the year, this is something that you can do that your future self—that version of you that comes back to work in the first week of January and is not really feeling motivated to do too much.

When your phone is ringing, when you've got emails from prospects, when you are receiving messages from people who want to do business with you, that'll be something that really helps you get moving in 2026.

Now, just to let you know, this is the last episode of the year for the podcast. We are coming back in 2026, and I've got a special series of episodes to start the new year with.

We are going to be doing some themes around, firstly, momentum and mindset to start 2026. We'll then be moving into a series of episodes on pipeline, prospecting, and production power.

I've got a great series of episodes for you on leadership, leverage, and agency growth, and finally, I've got a series of episodes for you on tools, productivity, and modern commercial real estate execution.

Now, this special series of episodes is being created using the ultimate leverage by reusing some podcast episodes from our vault of 251 episodes.

And I haven't just searched the name—like “momentum” or “mindset”—and found four episodes to put together.

I've used the power of one, the podcast platforms, which provide really rich data around listener habits like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

They provide stats around how many times an episode has been re-listened to by the same person, and how long the episode retains the listener for.

And that tells you that it's a quality episode. So, I've looked for the best episodes to reuse, to recycle, and to represent to you at the start of 2026 under those four categories.

So that's what's coming to you at the start of 2026. We are going to have the first episode for you ready to go on the 14th of January.

So, we're just taking three weeks off, and we're back on the 14th of January with that series of episodes for you.

I do want to take this opportunity to say I hope you have a great Christmas, and all the best for the new year. And since it is our final episode of the year, a few quick thank yous.

First of all, thank you to my clients—my private clients, commercial real estate principals—and also to various organizations who have invited me to speak at their events in 2025.

I want to thank the members that we have at CRE Success inside Agent Accelerator.

So, we have clients, we have members, and then we've also got customers.

Customers are people who do things like register for workshops that we hosted throughout the year. So, thank you to you as well.

Thank you to our listeners and to our viewers on various platforms like YouTube. We've grown on YouTube this year, and we've also grown in terms of podcast downloads. Particularly in the past few weeks there's been a little bit of a spike. So, if you're one of those new listeners or viewers, I say thank you. And thank you to everyone else in our wider network.

2025 was an interesting year. I know a lot of people have found this year hard. Really great to see so many of my clients and members outperform the market in terms of this business.

And I look at my business in terms of the performance on a calendar-year basis. Sometimes I'm looking at it on a financial-year basis, and I also look at the year-to-date through to the 31st of March because the business started in April 2020.

And I can tell you that this year's growth—we've grown the business once again. And a little metric that I like to track is when throughout the year, did we pass the threshold of the previous full year's revenue?

And for this year, it was on the 2nd of December. So, on the 2nd of December, we had already produced more revenue in this calendar year than we did for all of 2024.

So that's, I guess, a good thing—that we're still growing. So, thank you for your support.

One way that your support helps others is that CRE Success has made a $2,500 donation to the Fred Hollows Foundation, who of course do excellent work in restoring sight for people from developing countries and also for people from disadvantaged communities. So that's one way that your support of this podcast is making a difference to somebody else.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you in 2026.