If you're a property broker looking for a summer reading list, Robert Manekin has some recommendations for you. And if you work at JLL, you can join his book club.
Manekin, with more than four decades of commercial real estate experience, is leading what he calls the Broker Book Club, based in JLL's Baltimore office.
The club is open to JLL brokers and has become somewhat of an adjunct to the brokerage's formal training programs such as JLL University.
The club's reading list focuses on business and how-to sales books and "is doing wonders to engage and connect with new hires and younger brokers," he said in an email.
The book club isn't a formal part of the brokerage's training program, "but was a byproduct of some local training and networking and it really caught on in Baltimore," he added.
The group first met a year ago, and the first two books its members read were "Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty" by Patrick Lencioni and "The Little Red Book of Selling" by Jeffrey Gitomer.
The club's first two meetings were in person. The third one will be online. Manekin said brokers in the club come from across JLL's mid-Atlantic region. "We do have one person participating from outside our region in Charleston, South Carolina," he said.
For brokers outside JLL looking for something to read this summer, the Broker Book Club now is reading "Smart Brevity" by Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.