Commercial Real Estate marketing
Be the broker with the market data everyone else quotes
A few hundred people in your city decide whether you get invited to pitch. They are not searching a consumer portal; they are asking their adviser and reading whoever publishes the numbers. That is a narrower marketing job than it looks, and a harder one.
What usually goes wrong
Where commercial real estate marketing tends to fail
Commercial space is not found the way a house is found. An occupier needing twelve thousand square feet does not open a consumer portal. Their agent opens a listing platform, calls three brokers they already rate, and checks who has published anything worth reading about that submarket this quarter.
So the marketing job is narrower and harder than it looks. The people who decide whether you are invited to pitch number in the hundreds, most of them already know your competitors, and the only reliable way to move up their list is visible evidence that you understand the market better than the firm they used last time.
- The website is a listings feed with no argument in it.
- Most brokerage sites are a search box over a set of availabilities. That serves a person who already has a requirement and already chose you, which is the smallest and easiest part of the job. The adviser deciding whether you are worth a call needs something else entirely: what you know about that submarket, which deals of this type you have actually done, and who in the team handles this asset class. None of that is on the page.
- Tenant side and landlord side are sold from the same paragraph.
- An occupier is buying an advocate who will negotiate against a landlord. A landlord is buying an agent who will let space at the asking rent to a covenant they trust. Those are opposing promises, and a page that makes both makes neither credible. The firms that handle this well separate the two propositions completely, with different content, different proof and different enquiry routes, and are explicit about how conflicts are managed.
- You collect the market data and publish none of it.
- Every transaction produces evidence: achieved rent, rent-free period, fit-out contribution, lease length, how long the unit sat. Firms hold that internally out of habit, then wonder why the market quotes somebody else. A quarterly report with a stated methodology, published as a page rather than as a gated download, is the single asset in this sector that produces citations, inbound calls from journalists and a reason for an adviser to have your name in front of them.
- Marketing is judged on enquiry volume in a twenty-deal year.
- Counting form submissions is meaningless when a good year is twenty transactions and one of them pays for the department. The measures that work here are pipeline-shaped: requirements registered with a named occupier and a target date, pitches invited, instructions won by asset class. Until reporting is rebuilt around those, the marketing budget will be argued about with numbers that describe nothing.
- The brokers hold the relationships and the firm markets only itself.
- In commercial property the individual is the product to a degree most firms are uncomfortable admitting. Advisers refer to a person, not to a logo, and a broker who moves takes the requirements with them. Firm-level marketing that gives individual brokers no visible profile, no authored commentary and no way to be found by name is spending money to build an asset that will not answer the phone.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- The shortlist usually arrives second-hand. An occupier asks their project manager, their lawyer or their existing agent for two names, and the search that follows is a check on whether those names hold up rather than a search for options.
- Track record is judged at the level of asset class and submarket, not city. Having let a lot of office space is not evidence for an industrial requirement on the other side of the ring road, and experienced buyers know the difference.
- The ability to produce evidence quickly is a live test. A broker who can put achieved rents, incentives and comparable deals in front of a client within a day is demonstrating the thing the client is actually paying for.
- Team stability matters because the engagement outlasts most staff tenures. A leasing mandate or a search can run a year or more, and clients ask, directly, whether the person in the room will still be there at completion.
- Landlords weight reach and credibility with the occupier market; occupiers weight negotiating posture and independence. The same firm is assessed on opposite qualities depending on which side of the table the client sits.
- Fee is discussed late and rarely decides it, because the fee is a small fraction of the rent commitment being advised on. What does decide it is confidence that the advice will hold up when it is repeated to a board.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
Publish the numbers your market argues over
A quarterly submarket report built from your own transaction evidence, with the methodology stated and the figures dated, is the highest-return asset available to a brokerage. It gets cited by journalists, quoted by advisers and forwarded inside occupier organisations, and it puts your name in front of the exact people who write shortlists. It also compounds: the fourth edition is more valuable than the first because it carries a trend.
Search built for a few hundred buyers
The searches that matter here have double-digit monthly volume and five-figure fees attached. That means writing pages that pin down an asset class, a submarket and a specific process question at once, rather than chasing anything broad, and accepting that a page read by forty people can be the best-performing page on the site.
Reach the people who write the shortlist
This is one of the few markets where the audience can be defined by job title and employer with real precision: property directors, heads of workplace, finance leads at occupiers you already know are approaching a lease event. Used to distribute research rather than to sell, it puts your evidence in front of a named audience that no search campaign could isolate.
Match the vocabulary the market actually uses
Square feet or square metres, to let or for lease, industrial or logistics, unit or suite: the terms differ by country, by asset class and by whether the searcher is an occupier or an adviser. Getting this wrong produces pages that read correctly and are never found. Getting it right is unglamorous groundwork that determines whether anything else works.
A research library with availabilities attached
The site needs to work as a reference rather than as a brochure: reports as pages with figures and dates, broker profiles by discipline and asset class, submarket pages that carry evidence, and availabilities that clearly state whether they are still on the market. Two enquiry routes, one for occupiers and one for landlords, keep the adversarial halves of the business from undercutting each other.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Occupiers and their advisers looking for space
Specific, dated and low volume. Every one of these is attached to a real requirement with a budget behind it.
- office space for lease downtown
- warehouse for lease near [motorway junction]
- industrial units to let [city]
- retail space for rent [high street]
- flexible office space [district] 30 people
- cold storage facility for lease [region]
Market evidence and numbers
Read by advisers, analysts and journalists. This is where a research programme earns citations rather than clicks.
- [city] office vacancy rate
- industrial rents per square foot [region]
- average lease incentives [city] office market
- [submarket] net absorption this quarter
- prime yields [city] logistics
Choosing an adviser
A verification search. They usually arrive with a name and are deciding whether it survives ten minutes of checking.
- tenant representation broker [city]
- commercial real estate broker [asset class] [city]
- how does a tenant rep broker get paid
- landlord leasing agent [submarket]
- commercial property agent for industrial [region]
Process and lease terms
Asked by the person inside the occupier who has to explain the deal internally. Cheap to answer and rarely answered well.
- what is a triple net lease
- how long does a commercial lease take to negotiate
- what is a tenant improvement allowance
- break clause commercial lease explained
- schedule of condition commercial lease
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- Availability listings that state size, use class, specification and whether the unit is still on the market
- Submarket pages carrying rent evidence and current incentives rather than descriptions of the neighbourhood
- Broker profiles by discipline and asset class, naming deals they are permitted to name
- A research library where every report is a readable page rather than a gated download
- Tenant representation and landlord agency separated, with different enquiry routes and different proof
- Every published figure carrying a date and a stated methodology
- Floor plans, specification sheets and site plans attached to the unit they describe
- Licensing and entity details displayed as your jurisdiction requires them
- Pages that load quickly on a corporate network, since much of this is read at a desk behind a proxy
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Tours booked, and tours per live requirement
- Requirements registered with a named occupier, a size band and a target date
- Pitches invited, and the pitch-to-mandate rate by asset class
- Landlord instructions won, counted separately from occupier mandates
- Time from first contact to signed heads of terms
- Citations of your research in trade press and by other advisers
- Search volume on individual broker names, as a measure of personal profile
- Deals closed where the client can name a report, an article or a broker they had read
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
Commercial brokerage is a licensed activity in most markets, and the rules commonly govern how the licensed entity must be identified in advertising, what may be stated about a property, and how agency relationships must be disclosed when a firm acts on both sides. The requirements vary by province, state and country and are revised regularly. We write within whatever framework applies to you and ask you to confirm the specifics with your own licensing body before anything is published. This is not legal advice.
Published market data carries its own exposure. Yields, valuations, income figures and forecasts presented to an investor audience can engage financial promotion or securities rules depending on the jurisdiction and on who the material is aimed at. We publish only figures you can evidence and are permitted to release, we date them, and we defer to your legal adviser on how they must be qualified.
Comparative and superlative claims about market position are the most commonly challenged statements in the category. Where a ranking, market share or transaction volume figure cannot be evidenced from a source you are able to cite, we leave it out rather than soften it into something unfalsifiable.
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
Our deals come from relationships. What is marketing supposed to add?
It adds reach into the relationships you do not have yet, and it protects the ones you do. Every referral gets checked, and the check is quick: your site, your recent commentary, the profile of the broker who was recommended.
The other function is timing. Relationships tell you about a requirement when someone remembers to call. Published research and a visible profile put your name in front of an adviser at the moment they are drafting a shortlist, which is often months earlier.
If we publish our market data, are we not helping competitors?
They already have most of it. Achieved rents, incentives and vacancy movement circulate through the broker network within weeks, so the confidentiality you are protecting is usually shorter-lived than it feels.
What publishing changes is who gets credited for the analysis. The firm that produces the report everyone quotes is the firm perceived to know the market, and that perception is what earns the invitation to pitch. Where a specific figure is genuinely confidential to a client, it stays out.
Can one website serve tenant representation and landlord agency?
One site, yes. One proposition, no. The two halves need separate sections with their own arguments, proof and enquiry routes, because the promises are opposed and a visitor can tell when a page is trying to reassure both sides.
It is also worth being explicit about how you handle conflicts, since a sophisticated occupier will ask. Saying nothing reads worse than saying how it works.
How do we measure marketing when we close twenty deals a year?
Not on conversions, because the sample is too small to say anything. The reporting that works is pipeline-shaped: requirements registered, tours booked, pitches invited, instructions won, and how long each stage takes.
Alongside that, track the leading signals that move faster than deals do: research citations, broker name searches, and whether new clients can name something of yours they had read. Those move within a quarter and they predict the deals that arrive later.
The listing platforms carry our availabilities. Do we need our own?
You need both, doing different jobs. The platforms are where a live requirement gets matched to space, and withdrawing from them costs you deals for no benefit.
Your own listings exist for the visitor who arrived because of your research or your broker rather than because of a search for space, and they need to answer a different question: not what is available, but whether this firm is the one to run the process. That is why the specification, the evidence and the named broker matter more on your page than the photograph does.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your commercial real estate business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal