Morgul Marketing

    Denver, CO

    Filming Front Range buildings that cool at altitude, take hail and sit on soil that moves

    Most of what a Denver brokerage should be filming has nothing to do with the skyline. It is the evaporative cooler on a warehouse roof in Arvada, the slab under a tenant's racking, the rooftop units after a hail spring, and the heavy power service in a building that used to grow something. Those are the questions occupiers and owners along the Front Range actually ask a broker, and the answers are hard to find anywhere else. What follows is the local half of a social program for a firm working this metro, and why each piece of it only makes sense here.

    Evaporative cooling is ordinary here and baffling to everyone else

    At this elevation and this humidity a building conditions itself in ways an occupier from a wetter market has never had to think about.

    Older industrial across Wheat Ridge, Arvada and Englewood still cools with an evaporative cooler. A tenant who has only ever run refrigerated air walks into that building, sees a box on the roof with a water line running to it, and has no idea what he is looking at.

    Stand next to it and explain it. What a swamp cooler does in low humidity, what happens to it during a wet stretch in August, what it costs to run against a packaged unit, and what a tenant has to add if the operation inside needs steady conditions.

    Combustion equipment has an altitude story of its own. Gas appliances are set up differently at a mile of elevation than they are at sea level, and the unit heaters hanging in a warehouse were specified with that in mind. An occupier moving a plant here from a coastal market has never had that conversation with anybody.

    Humidification is the other half of it. Uses that never mention water in a humid market, printing, food, some labs and light manufacturing, arrive on the Front Range and find they need it. A short piece on what a building already has and what a tenant would have to add sits in front of a reader who has a real requirement.

    A hail spring makes last year's exterior footage wrong

    Hail is a routine cost of owning a building along the Front Range, and it changes what a property looks like between one shoot and the next.

    Metal takes it first. Condenser fins, rooftop screening, gutters, downspouts and parapet caps carry the record of which springs a building has been through, and that inventory gets replaced on a shorter cycle here than the climate alone would suggest.

    A clip filmed last April can show a roof that is no longer up there. Buyers notice the mismatch when they get on the building, and an occupier who flew in from a mild market notices it harder, because he was not expecting the roof to be a topic at all.

    So treat Front Range exteriors as perishable. Reshoot elevations and rooftops more often than a firm in a gentler market would, and put the month the footage was taken where a viewer can see it rather than letting an old clip pass as current.

    When an owner has documentation on a recent roof or new screening, show it on camera as the document it is. Occupiers here ask about roof age early and often, and a firm that already has the paperwork assembled sounds different from one that offers to go find out.

    The slab is what a racking tenant is really buying

    Soil along the Front Range swells and shrinks with moisture, and a warehouse floor sits on top of it.

    Expansive soil is a standing engineering consideration in this metro rather than an occasional surprise. Bentonite takes on water, moves when it gets it, and gives it back in a dry stretch, and slabs, drives and dock aprons live with the result.

    A tenant putting up tall racking or running lift trucks all day cares about the floor long before he cares about the office finish. Film it at floor level: a slow pass across the joints, the dock apron, the transition at the overhead door, and the grading and drainage that decide how much water gets under the building in the first place.

    Hand over what the owner has. A floor flatness report, a slab repair history, drainage work done in recent years. Those documents answer the question a video can only raise, and having them assembled before anybody asks is worth more than another exterior clip.

    Do the same for the yard. Drives and trailer parking on this ground move too, so a buyer weighing a bay in Adams County against one in Douglas County is comparing two different pieces of dirt rather than two rent numbers.

    A cultivation past stops the boost while the plain post runs fine

    Colorado's licensed cultivation buildout left behind industrial stock that automated ad review reads badly.

    That buildout produced buildings with heavy power service, added ventilation, floor drains and secure rooms, and a good deal of it has since traded and re-tenanted. Ordinary inventory along the Front Range and unusual almost anywhere else.

    An organic post describing the building generally runs without trouble. Put money behind the same post and it enters ad review, where cannabis adjacent language is restricted and the rejection arrives without explaining itself. Platform policies move, so check the current advertising rules before planning spend around that inventory.

    Clever wording is not the way through it. Describe the physical building instead. The service from Xcel Energy, the ventilation, the drains, the secure rooms and the floor, and let a food producer or a power hungry tenant recognize what they need. Keep a written log of what gets rejected and why, because the same class of listing will meet the same wall again.

    Everything that works the same way in every market, who is allowed to speak for the firm, what to do with a post that cannot travel, and how to tell whether any of it is working, we have written out once at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media. The four questions above are the ones that only make sense at this elevation.

    Questions we actually get

    Our industrial listing runs fine organically but gets rejected the moment we put money behind it. Why?
    Almost always the language around a building with a cultivation history. Heavy power, added ventilation, floor drains and secure rooms read as ordinary industrial to a broker on the Front Range and as restricted content to automated ad review. Rewrite the promoted version around the physical building and the Xcel Energy service, keep a log of which listings get refused, and check the current advertising policy before you budget spend against that inventory.
    An occupier relocating here keeps asking how the building cools. Is that really worth a video?
    Yes, and it is one of the few things on your listings that has no good answer online. Evaporative cooling behaves nothing like refrigerated air, gas equipment is specified for the elevation, and a tenant with a humidity sensitive process needs to know what the building has before he needs to know the rent. Two minutes on the roof answers it better than a paragraph in a flyer.
    Do we need to reshoot exteriors after a hail spring?
    Usually, for anything that has metal in the frame. Screening, condenser tops, gutters and roof surfaces change, and a buyer standing on the building with your footage in his hand will see the difference. Reshooting elevations and the roof, and showing what the owner has documented about a replacement, costs a broker one afternoon and keeps the whole library current.
    A tenant wants to know about the warehouse floor before he commits to racking. Can we film that?
    Film the floor and hand over the paperwork. A slow pass along the joints, the dock apron and the door transition, plus the grading and drainage around the building, shows a tenant what he is putting racking on, in a metro where the soil under it moves with moisture. Then send the owner's floor flatness report and slab history, which is what a tenant's engineer will ask for next.
    A food producer likes the drains and the ventilation in a former grow building. Do we say what it used to be?
    Say what the building has rather than what it was. The service, the ventilation capacity, the drains, the floor and the secure rooms are the things a food or beverage tenant is actually shopping for, and they describe the asset accurately without dragging the post into a review queue. If a prospect asks directly, a broker can answer the history on a call.

    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.

    Talk to us about social media for commercial real estate firms in Denver

    Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.

    No newsletter, no drip sequence. One reply from a person.