Morgul Marketing

    Chicago's old buildings generate the questions your brokerage can rank for

    National portals own the phrases your firm would like to own. Chicago office space for lease is not a fight worth funding. What is open is everything the buildings themselves generate: a greystone storefront with a lower level and no dock, a courtyard building running on one boiler, a Will County box that needs more power than the service can carry. Owners and occupiers search those questions, find thin answers, and remember whoever wrote a real one. A brokerage that publishes what it already knows about this building stock builds organic demand a national platform has no reason to compete for.

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    Two-flat and three-flat buyers search in a vocabulary no national portal writes in

    Small multifamily is a Chicago asset class with its own language, and pages that use it correctly get found by people who are ready to transact.

    A buyer looking at a three-flat in Ravenswood is not searching commercial real estate. They are searching for a three-flat, a two-flat, a courtyard building, a greystone with a coach house. Those words carry deal terms with them: unit count, heat, parking off the rear alley, whether the garden unit counts.

    Write pages that use them. One on what a two-flat trades on. One on what changes above a certain unit count. One on what a courtyard building costs to run through a Chicago winter. Each is a real question with thin published answers and a buyer attached.

    The same pages work on the sell side. An owner deciding whether to list a Logan Square three-flat reads the buyer's page first, then looks for who wrote it.

    Portals index inventory. They do not write about one city's building stock in any depth, because their template has to work in Phoenix too.

    A steam boiler and a soft parapet are search queries long before they are line items

    Freeze and thaw drive the capital questions Chicago owners ask, and almost none of them have a good answer written by a broker.

    Masonry moves here. Water gets into a parapet in November, freezes, and takes the wall apart over a few seasons. Heating plants installed generations ago are the largest single number in a small building's operating statement. Roofs carry snow load.

    Owners search these things when a bid lands on the desk, not when they are ready to sell. Meeting them at that moment is cheap. A page on what deferred tuckpointing does to an appraisal, or how a heating conversion changes net operating income, is honest content with a clear next step.

    Keep the register careful. Write generally, describe how the question is usually approached, and say plainly that scope, cost and code compliance are worth confirming with the local building department, an engineer or your own counsel.

    The payoff is not the traffic. It is that the owner who read it calls you when the building goes to market.

    The storefront with a lower level and no dock raises three questions you can answer first

    City retail and light industrial come with basements, rear alleys and narrow lots, and every tenant asks the same handful of questions about them.

    How usable is the lower level. Whether a truck can reach the rear alley and what turns it has to make. What the sewer situation looks like in a part of the city where water in the basement is a normal risk rather than an exotic one.

    Those questions get asked on every tour in Wicker Park, Pilsen and Andersonville. Answer them once, properly, and link every listing to the answer.

    The lower level page is the strongest of the three. Usable square footage below grade is worth real money to a restaurant or a fitness tenant and close to nothing to others, and no portal filter captures the difference.

    Never conclude anything about a specific property's drainage or sewer condition on a marketing page. Describe what tenants generally ask and how you would go about finding out.

    A change of use in Pilsen and one in Naperville are not the same page

    The city and the collar counties run separate permitting and licensing regimes, so one page about approvals will serve neither audience.

    A tenant converting a Pilsen storefront to a food use and a tenant doing the same in Naperville deal with different departments, different sequences and different people to call. Practice varies by municipality and is worth confirming locally in every case.

    Search follows that split. People type the municipality. Build a page for each one you actually work, and keep the list honest. Cook County plus DuPage, Lake, Will and Kane covers most of what a Chicagoland firm touches, and you do not have to claim all of it.

    Each page needs something only you know: which submarkets you have leased in, what recent deals turned on, who a tenant should expect to deal with. Municipal boilerplate ranks for nothing and helps nobody.

    Say what you do not do. A firm that admits it does not work Kane County reads as more credible on the counties it does.

    Nobody appoints a leasing agent from a box with three pins in it

    Local pack results are worth having and will not bring you a landlord assignment, so budget your attention accordingly.

    A business profile helps somebody who already knows your name, or who is standing in the Loop looking for your office. Keep it accurate, keep the photos current, keep the hours right, then stop.

    The searches that matter to a brokerage are not proximity searches. A landlord in Skokie comparing three firms for a listing is reading pages, bios and market notes, often from another state entirely.

    Proximity works against you across a metro this wide. One address will not place you in front of an Evanston owner and a Joliet owner at the same time, and opening offices to fix a map ranking is an expensive answer to a small problem.

    Spend the effort on pages that survive being forwarded. Those are the ones that get into the pitch.

    December is when owners read about snow obligations and nobody publishes for them

    Winter changes what people look up here, and the publishing calendar at most firms ignores it entirely.

    Snow and ice responsibility is a live question in every Chicago lease. Who clears the walk, who clears the lot, what happens at the loading area, what the tenant carries. Owners and tenants look it up in the first hard week of the season.

    Frozen and burst pipes belong in the same window. A vacant suite with the heat turned down is a problem waiting to happen, and an owner reading about it in December is an owner thinking about the whole portfolio.

    Publish ahead of the weather rather than during it. A page that goes live in October has time to be found by the time somebody needs it.

    Handle the legal edges carefully. Lease language and insurance coverage vary, and the page should say that specific obligations and any claim are matters for the owner's counsel and insurer.

    Questions we get

    We already syndicate to the portals. Why does our own site need SEO?
    Syndication puts your inventory where buyers browse. It does not put your firm where owners decide who to hire. The portal page ranks for the building; your page ranks for the question the owner asked before they thought about brokers at all. The two do different jobs and only one of them is yours to keep.
    Should we build a page for every Chicago neighborhood?
    Only for the ones you actually work. A page on Lakeview retail written by somebody who has leased there reads differently from thirty templated submarket pages with the name swapped. Start with the four or five submarkets that produce your fees, plus the suburbs you cover, and add more when you have something real to say.
    Do sold and leased listings help us or hurt us?
    Keep them, mark the status clearly, and link to current availability nearby. Deleting a leased building throws away whatever links and search history it accumulated. A page marked leased with the terms you can share is also evidence, and evidence is what an owner is looking for on your site.
    Our brokers have no time to write. Who produces this?
    Nobody should ask a producing broker for a draft. A workable process is a short recorded conversation, a written version prepared from it, then a review pass where the broker corrects what is wrong. Most brokers will give twenty minutes of talking and five minutes of correcting, and that is enough.
    How long before this produces inquiries?
    Nobody can honestly promise a date or a ranking, and any agency that does is guessing. What can be said is the shape: specific, low competition questions tend to move before broad commercial phrases, and a page has to be live and indexed before anything else happens. Judge the program on whether the right pages exist and whether the questions they answer are the ones your buyers actually ask.

    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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