Morgul Marketing

    Austin, TX

    Trees, rock, power and a closed deal post with no price in it

    Texas keeps sale prices out of the public record, so nearly everything this market believes a building traded for came from somebody who was in the deal. One fact reshapes what a Central Texas firm can publish about its own work, and it is the reason a brokerage here can be a source rather than an echo. The rest of what deserves a camera in this market sits on the ground. A heritage tree standing where a buyer has already drawn his building, limestone at grade where he assumed a soft dig, and a power question with only one answer inside the city utility's territory. Below is why each of those is local and what to do with it.

    Film the heritage tree before you film the dirt

    On a Central Texas site, what stands on the lot decides the site plan long before the building does.

    Tree protection and impervious cover rules here are stricter than most of the state, and they routinely surprise people who have developed elsewhere in Texas. A buyer looking at acreage and imagining a footprint is going to be corrected, and it is cheaper to be corrected by your video than by a review.

    So stand at the base of a protected tree and film the part that matters. What a critical root zone does to where pavement can go, how far a drive has to swing around it, and what cover limits do to the footprint a site will hold. Almost nobody in this market has filmed the plain version of that.

    Do it on a real tract with a real problem rather than in an office. A heritage tree sitting in the middle of the only sensible truck route teaches more in two minutes than a diagram does in a page, and the buyer who watches it turns up to the next call with better questions.

    Cover is the number that quietly decides the deal, and nobody films it either. Walk the drainage, the existing paving and the part of the tract that will never carry a building, so a buyer can see how much of his acreage is already spoken for before he prices it.

    Rock at grade is the line item a buyer from a softer market forgot

    Limestone and karst run under much of this area, sometimes at or just below the surface, and excavation stops being a formality.

    Trenching, foundations, underground utility runs and any below grade work turn into equipment problems with real money attached. A buyer who developed on soft ground somewhere else prices the dig as a rounding error and finds out later.

    Film a cut face where the rock is visible, or the spoil beside a trench that had to be hammered. Seconds of that does what a paragraph cannot, and it is the single most useful piece of land content available in Central Texas.

    West of the city the ground adds slope and access on top of the rock. A tract out toward Dripping Springs or Bee Cave may be reachable by one gate and one caliche track, which changes how equipment gets in and what a pad costs to cut before anybody argues about price per acre.

    Karst also means voids, and voids mean surprises during construction. A firm that shows what the site work on a comparable tract actually involved, rather than another aerial pass over the acreage, ends up being the one land buyers call first.

    Inside the city utility's territory there is nobody to shop for power with

    Austin Energy is municipally owned, so an operator who moved a company here from another Texas metro cannot do the thing he did last time.

    Retail choice is normal across most of the state. An occupier signs with a provider, negotiates a rate and treats power as a line item he controls. Inside the service territory the address decides the provider, and there is nothing to shop.

    Which side of a service boundary a building sits on therefore changes the conversation rather than just the bill. Program eligibility, capacity questions and the study that answers them all run through whoever serves that specific location, and an address that says Austin does not settle it.

    So make the plain explainer. A short piece telling a relocating operator what he will and will not be choosing saves a first meeting that would otherwise go on unwinding an assumption he carried in from his last market.

    Industrial and any process load make it the opening question rather than the closing one. A tenant with equipment to plug in wants service answered before he wants a floor plan, and a firm that has already published how power works here starts that conversation a step ahead.

    The closed deal post has no number in it, so publish the search instead

    Sale prices are not public record in Texas, which changes both what a completed transaction can be written up as and who gets to be the source.

    In a state that publishes prices, data vendors own the market narrative and a brokerage is mostly repeating them. Here the participants are the record. A firm that writes up its own completed work consistently is producing something the vendors genuinely cannot.

    What goes in the write up is the part people wanted anyway. What the requirement was, how long the search ran, which submarkets came off the list and why, what nearly killed it in diligence, and what the occupier chose in the end.

    Run it as a standing format rather than an occasional post. Central Texas turns over constantly, and an operator who encounters your third write up learns more about how this market clears than any listing page will teach him.

    How to run the rest of a program, who may speak for the firm, what to do with a post that will not travel and how to judge whether the whole thing is working, we have set out once at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media, which lets this page stay on what only holds between Travis, Williamson and Hays.

    Questions we actually get

    A buyer has already drawn a building on five acres. What should we film?
    Whatever contradicts his drawing. Stand at the protected tree and show what the critical root zone does to the drive, walk the drainage and the existing paving, and show how much of the tract is spoken for once cover limits are counted. A buyer who sees the constraint on video argues about it on the tour instead of after the survey comes back.
    Is limestone really worth making a video about?
    It is the best land content available here. A buyer from a softer market has no picture of rock at grade, so film a cut face, a hammered trench or the spoil pile beside one. Add the access problem on a Hill Country tract, where one gate and one caliche track decide how equipment gets in, and you have answered the two questions that move a land price.
    We just closed something good and cannot publish the price. What is left to post?
    The search, which is the interesting half. What the requirement was, how long it ran, which submarkets got eliminated and why, what nearly killed it in diligence, and what the occupier picked. In a state that does not publish prices, participants are the only real record of how this market clears, so a firm writing that down regularly becomes a reference point.
    An operator relocating from another Texas metro asked us which electricity provider to sign with. Is that a post?
    It is one of the most useful posts you can make here. Inside the municipal utility's territory the address decides the provider and there is no retail choice, which is the opposite of what he did last time. Say that plainly, say that eligibility and capacity questions follow the same boundary, and offer to check the specific address for a real requirement.
    We list in Round Rock and Georgetown too. Does the Austin land video apply out there?
    Not cleanly, and treating it as though it does will cost you credibility with the first buyer who checks. Tree and cover review inside the city is stricter than what a tract in Williamson County goes through, so either film a separate version for the outlying counties or say on camera which ground the rules you are describing apply to.

    What is different here

    Brokerage is licensed and advertising generally has to identify the brokerage rather than only the individual. The more practical constraint is that this industry is bought at submarket grain: a downtown tower and a suburban flex park are different products with different tenants, and content pitched at a whole metro tends to speak to neither.

    Commercial Real Estate Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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