Morgul Marketing

    What an Austin brokerage website has to do before anyone calls

    A commercial site is not a brochure. It is a working tool that gets opened from a forwarded email, usually on a phone, often by someone who has never driven this metro and cannot place Buda or Leander on a map. In the first few seconds it has to say what the building is, where it sits, and who to call, then get out of the way. Most brokerage sites fail at that not because they look bad but because they were designed for the person who already knows the market. Build for the second reader instead, and the rest of the decisions get easier.

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    The link gets forwarded to a committee, so build the page for the second reader

    The person who found the listing is rarely the person who signs the lease.

    A broker sends an availability page to a facilities contact, who forwards it to a CFO and an operations lead. Neither of them saw the conversation that preceded it. The page has to stand alone.

    So restate the basics on every listing page: what the building is, which county and submarket it sits in, the size available, the use it suits, and a named person with a direct number. No page should only make sense as step three of a sequence.

    Give every listing a stable, readable URL and a proper link preview. A pasted link that unfurls with a blank image and a generic title looks careless in a thread with a decision maker on it.

    Print matters more than people expect. Somebody will print the page for a committee meeting, so check that it prints without the navigation swallowing half the sheet.

    A newcomer cannot check your reputation over lunch, so put the process on the page

    Steady in-migration keeps producing decision makers with no local network to ask about you.

    A firm that has been in the market thirty years has referrals. A tenant who arrived last year has a browser. Those two facts meet on your about page, and most about pages say nothing useful.

    Publish how you work. What a tenant representation engagement covers, how a broker is generally compensated in a lease transaction, what the first two weeks look like, what you will ask them for. Descriptive, not promissory.

    Build broker bios around territory and asset class rather than titles and awards. Which counties, which submarkets, which building types. Someone deciding whether to call needs to know if you actually work Williamson County or just list it.

    An owner preparing for a listing presentation reads those pages the night before, which is about as close to a decision as a website gets. They are also, in most firms we look at, the pages nobody has touched in two years.

    Every land and pad site page needs slope, access and cover before it needs renderings

    A buyer looking at Hill Country acreage is trying to work out what the site will let them do, and a rendering answers none of it.

    Publish the factual attributes: topography, road frontage and access points, tree cover, utilities at or near the site, and which studies exist and are available on request. Link the survey and any reports rather than paraphrasing them.

    Say plainly what the local conditions are without diagnosing the parcel. Shallow limestone and karst make excavation a rock problem across much of Central Texas, slope and access add difficulty west of the city, and conditions vary enough that a site evaluation is the only real answer.

    Never let a marketing field conclude what a heritage tree or an impervious cover limit allows. Local rules on tree protection and cover are unusually strict, they vary by lot, and they add a review step that surprises people who have built elsewhere in Texas. Write that requirements are generally worth confirming with the city and your own counsel before design work begins.

    A page built this way is longer and less pretty than a hero image with a price. It is also the one a serious buyer forwards to their engineer.

    Ask which county, what use, and whether a sublease will do

    A short, structured form routes an inquiry; a long one gets abandoned.

    The minimum useful set: county or submarket, size range, intended use, target date, and how to reach them. Add one checkbox for whether sublease space is acceptable, because it changes which inventory the broker opens.

    For industrial and flex inquiries, one more question earns its keep: is electrical service a constraint. Inside the city, service comes from a municipally owned utility, while much of the state runs on competing retail providers, so the answer depends on the address and should be confirmed with the utility serving it. Knowing early prevents a wasted tour.

    Leave a free text box. Requirements are strange and specific, and the sentence someone types there is usually worth more than the dropdowns above it.

    Do not put a confidentiality agreement in front of first contact. Anyone who wants the document badly enough will sign for it, including the competitor you were worried about, while the principal who was only half decided about calling you closes the tab.

    Leased and sold buildings should stay published with the terms taken out

    A page that vanishes takes its links, its search history and its proof with it.

    Mark the listing leased or sold, remove anything confidential, keep the photos and the specifications, and add a link to comparable current availability so the visitor has somewhere to go.

    Owners in that submarket use those pages as evidence. A property owner in East Austin deciding who to appoint wants to see that you have transacted nearby, and a grid of past deals does that better than a claim on the homepage.

    Confirm with your client what may be shown. Deal terms should never appear on a public page without permission, and when in doubt the safe version omits the numbers entirely.

    When a page truly has to come down, redirect it to the submarket page rather than leaving a dead end.

    Judge load time on a Hill Country connection, not on your office wifi

    The visitor you most want is standing outside a building with one bar of signal.

    Set a page weight budget and hold the site to it. Photographers export enormous files, and a listing gallery straight out of a drone shoot will stall on a phone in Dripping Springs long before anyone sees the rent.

    Defer everything that is not needed for the first screen. Maps, video, chat widgets and analytics all belong after the content, not in front of it. Nothing above the first screen should wait on a script.

    Put drone reels and 3D tours behind a click. They are worth having. They are not worth blocking the page for.

    Test on a mid range Android phone over cellular, not on the newest device in the office. The gap between those two experiences is where inquiries disappear.

    Questions we get

    Do we need a full rebuild or can we fix what we have?
    Often you can fix it. If the site is on a maintained platform, loads reasonably, and lets you publish listings without a developer, the higher return is usually in the listing template, the form and the submarket pages. A rebuild is warranted when availability cannot be updated by the person who knows it, or when the page weight problem is structural.
    Should our availability come from a listing feed or be managed on the site?
    Either can work, but the test is the same: can a broker correct a detail in five minutes without filing a ticket. Feeds keep data consistent across portals and often produce thin pages that struggle to rank. Many firms end up with a hybrid, feeding the basics and enriching the pages that matter with local detail.
    Should we gate the offering memorandum behind a form?
    Gate the confidential document, not the conversation. Publish enough on the page that a principal can decide whether to keep reading, then ask for the agreement at the point where the sensitive material starts. Requiring a signature before anyone can learn what the building is tends to cost you the serious readers first.
    How fast does the site actually need to be?
    Fast enough that the first screen appears over cellular while someone is standing in a parking lot. Practically, that means compressed and correctly sized images, deferred maps and video, and no first paint blocked by scripts or fonts. Measure it on a real phone on a real connection rather than trusting a score from an office machine.
    What would you look at first on a site we already have?
    The listing template, the inquiry form and the submarket pages, roughly in that order, because that is where a forwarded link lands. To do that we need access to the site, a broker who can tell us which counties and asset classes each person works, and two listings you would point at: one you were happy with and one you were not. Moving a listing template across is mostly a mapping job, taking the fields you already publish and adding county, submarket and a named contact so the page stands on its own. After launch we would rather look at the form submissions with you every quarter than hand over a manual and disappear.
    What should a listing page never say?
    Anything that reads as a conclusion about code, entitlement, environmental condition or what a lot will permit. Describe conditions, link the documents, and state that requirements vary and are generally worth confirming with the city, the utility serving the address, or your own counsel. Marketing copy is a poor place to be wrong about a heritage tree.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    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.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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