Morgul Marketing

    Chicago, IL

    Your Chicago listing video belongs in the alley and down the basement stairs

    A brokerage feed here is never going to beat a listing portal on photographs. What it can do instead is walk to the parts of a building that decide whether a deal works, and in this city those parts are around the back or underneath. Loading happens off a rear alley. Vacant space is drained and held cold from November on. The lower level counts toward the square footage and takes water first. The storefront has somebody's apartment on top of it. Two minutes of honest video about any one of those answers a question an occupier would otherwise spend a week getting to, and none of the four is something a national brand page has ever had a reason to film.

    Your loading footage has to be shot from the alley

    Most commercial buildings in this city have no dock and no room to work off the street, so the rear alley is the entire answer to how goods get in and out.

    The block grid puts a service alley behind nearly everything. A greystone with a storefront under it, a corner building in Bridgeport, a small warehouse off Ravenswood: the doors that matter face the alley, and a flyer line about rear alley access tells an occupier none of what they need to know.

    What they want is whether their truck makes the turn. Alleys here are narrow, and the run to a door is crossed by garage aprons, dumpster enclosures, parking pads and whatever the block leaves out. A driver either swings it or backs the length of it every delivery for the whole term.

    So film the approach rather than the door. Come in off the street the way a delivery would, take the turn, stop at the building, then show the step or the ramp and where a pallet jack goes from there. One continuous clip settles the question, and it is footage a portal listing will never contain.

    Keep the frame on your own building. An alley is shared ground, and a slow pan down the block puts the back of somebody else's business into your marketing for no gain at all. The approach and the door are what the occupier came for.

    A winterized shell needs a sentence, not an apology

    Vacant space here gets drained and held cold so the pipes survive, and footage shot in that state reads as neglect unless the post says why.

    Freeze and thaw run from late fall into spring, so an owner shuts the water off to an empty unit, drains the lines, and holds the heat at whatever keeps the building safe rather than comfortable. It is ordinary maintenance and it is the correct decision.

    A walkthrough filmed in February shows the result and none of the reasoning. Lights off, a dry trap, a cold restroom, breath in the frame. A reader who has never heard the word winterized will supply a worse explanation without being asked.

    Say it in the post, plainly. The space is winterized, the water is off, the heat is at a hold, and here is what bringing it back involves and who arranges it. Occupiers who have leased in this city before will read an owner protecting a building. The ones who have not will learn something worth knowing before their first winter.

    Exteriors need the same line. A plow pile against the loading door and a salt line up the brick are the season rather than the property, and naming that in a caption costs you one sentence and saves a tour that would have started with an apology.

    If the lower level is in the square footage, it belongs on camera

    Almost every building in this city sits over a basement, and under a storefront that space is a real share of what you are marketing.

    Stock, prep, mechanicals, sometimes seating. A greystone or a two-flat storefront can carry nearly as much usable floor below grade as it does at the sidewalk, and it usually reaches a reader as a figure with nothing behind it.

    It is also the first place water arrives. Older sewers, heavy summer rain and a fast spring thaw make a backed up floor drain an ordinary conversation here, and an occupier who has run a business in the city already knows to ask about it before they ask about rent.

    Walk it on camera in one pass with a light. The stair and the head height under the beams, the floor drain, the ejector pit, where gas and electric come in, whether there is an overhead sewer, and what the owner has put in down there over the years.

    A listing that counts the lower level and never shows it reads as something being held back. A dry basement filmed straight through persuades more than any adjective on the flyer, and a wet one is going to come up on the tour regardless of what the post said.

    The apartments over the storefront decide what the storefront can be

    Mixed use is the standard form here, and the people living upstairs set limits on a commercial tenant that no square footage figure hints at.

    A two-flat or three-flat with retail below puts homes directly over the space you are leasing. Hours, noise, cooking exhaust, early freight and where the trash goes all become somebody's living room problem, and the lease is where that gets settled.

    Occupiers usually find out late. An operator planning a kitchen needs to know where a hood can vent and what it has to clear. A gym or a bar needs to know what old joists and a wood floor carry upward. A shop taking delivery at dawn needs to know whether the alley door sits under a bedroom window.

    So film the section of the building rather than the unit. Stand across the street and show the storefront with the flats above it, then the gangway, then the rear porch and the alley door. Plenty of occupiers can read their own answer off that, and the ones who cannot will call, which is the whole point of publishing it.

    The rest of it, the platform choices, what to do about a comment and what a brokerage can genuinely keep up week to week, does not change between here and anywhere else in the country, and we have set that part out at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Our vacant units are winterized all winter. Do we film them anyway?
    Film them and narrate the condition. A dark unit with the water off looks abandoned on video and looks ordinary in person, so the caption has to do the work the heat is not doing. Say the space is winterized, say what turning it back on involves and who arranges it, and bring a light so the reader sees the floor and the ceiling rather than a phone struggling in the dark. An occupier who understands why a building is cold stops reading it as a building nobody wants.
    Do we need permission to film in the alley behind a listing?
    The alley itself is public ground, but a good deal of what opens onto it is not. Garage aprons, parking pads, fenced yards and the neighbors' back doors belong to other people, and a camera lingering on any of them turns a marketing clip into a conversation you did not need. Keep the shot on the approach to your own building, the apron in front of the door and the door itself, and let it end there.
    What should a lower level walkthrough actually show?
    The stair, the head height under the beams, the floor drain, the ejector pit if there is one, where the utilities enter, and the condition of the walls at the base. Shoot it in a single pass with a light rather than cutting between angles, because a cut in a basement video reads as something skipped. If the space has taken water at some point, an occupier will hear about it from a neighbor within a week of moving in, so the walkthrough that shows the drain and the work done around it is the one that survives the tour.
    A storefront we are marketing has apartments above it. What changes about the content?
    The frame widens. Show the building rather than the unit, because the flats overhead are what limit hours, venting, noise and early freight, and an operator who learns that after signing has a fight ahead of them. Naming the constraint plainly costs you the occupiers who would have walked anyway and buys time with the ones who can work inside it.
    Does content from a suburban industrial building look different from a city storefront?
    Different in what it has to prove. A box in Will County or out toward Schaumburg turns on truck movement, clear height, power and yard, and the useful clip is shot from the driver's seat coming off the road. A city storefront turns on the alley, the lower level and what sits above it, and the useful clip is a walk. Same firm, same camera, two unrelated lists of questions, and one generic building tour answers neither.

    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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