Morgul Marketing

    A brokerage site built for six counties and an out of state occupier

    Most people who open a Denver brokerage website cannot place your submarkets on a map. They arrived from a search, a portal or an email a broker sent, and within a few seconds they are deciding whether you cover the ground their requirement sits on. A brokerage site earns its keep by answering that question fast, then by describing buildings the way they actually work in a high, dry market where mechanical systems, roofs and floor slabs behave differently than they do on a coast. Everything else on the site is packaging around those two jobs.

    Talk to us

    Every brokerage on the Front Range opens with the same mountain skyline photograph

    The hero image most local firms buy communicates nothing the visitor did not already know about where they are.

    Skyline and mountain photography is the default here, and it makes a dozen firms look interchangeable to somebody comparing three of them in adjacent browser tabs. It also tends to be the heaviest asset on the page.

    Use that space for information. Who you represent, which asset classes you trade, how many availabilities you are carrying right now and where they sit. A visitor deciding whether to call is looking for a match, not for scenery.

    Photography still matters on listing pages, where it shows a real building. It matters much less at the top of a homepage, where it delays the content that answers the actual question.

    If the firm has a genuine visual identity, spend it on the availability layout and the listing template. Those are the pages a broker sends to a client, and they carry your reputation further than a header ever will.

    Say whether you mean the city and county or the whole metro, before anyone scrolls

    Denver is a consolidated city and county, which makes the word on your homepage ambiguous to somebody deciding whether you can help.

    An occupier with a requirement in Castle Rock or a landlord with a building in Westminster wants to know whether you work there. Naming the counties, Denver, Jefferson, Arapahoe, Adams, Douglas and Boulder, answers it in one line.

    A simple coverage map does the job better than a paragraph. Mark the corridors you work rather than shading the whole state, because claiming everything reads as covering nothing.

    Give each submarket a URL rather than only a dropdown filter. Arvada, Englewood, Golden, Broomfield and Highlands Ranch are all things people search and things brokers link to, and a filter state usually cannot be shared or indexed.

    Say something honest about jurisdictional differences too. Practice varies across a short drive, and pointing visitors to the local building department for specifics is more credible than pretending the metro is one set of rules.

    The spec block has to say how the building cools, because at altitude that answer varies

    In a high, dry market the mechanical description of a building is a leasing fact rather than a footnote for the engineer.

    Evaporative cooling is a real option at this altitude and humidity and shows up in older industrial stock, which surprises occupiers arriving from humid markets. A listing template that says cooling: yes tells them nothing. Say what type, and say what serves the office area versus the warehouse.

    Add the fields that matter here: heating type, cooling type, whether any humidification exists, power service with a note to confirm current capacity with Xcel Energy, clear height, dock and drive-in doors, floor and roof age where the owner has provided it.

    Publish documents rather than summaries. Link the survey, the site plan and any engineering or roof report the owner is willing to share, and let the reader draw conclusions with their own consultant.

    Never let a marketing field carry a verdict on condition. Describe what is there, attribute the source, and say that a buyer should confirm structural, roof and insurance questions with a licensed engineer, their own contractor and their insurer.

    Ask when they need to be operating and what they need to plug in

    Two questions separate a genuine requirement from a browser faster than a long qualification form ever will.

    Occupancy date and power need do more sorting than any other pair of fields. Somebody who knows both is usually working to a deadline. Somebody who knows neither is early, and your reply should differ accordingly.

    Keep the rest minimal: county or submarket, approximate size, and one line for what they are trying to do. Every field beyond that costs you completions on a phone, and your broker will learn the rest in the first call anyway.

    Ask one question that distinguishes an owner from an occupier. An owner asking what a building is worth needs a different reply, a different broker and a different follow up than a tenant looking for space, and one shared form usually serves the tenant and loses the owner.

    Put the phone number where a thumb lands, on every page. A meaningful share of commercial inquiries never touch a form at all.

    The listing feed renders in the browser, so your most important page is your slowest

    Availability search is usually bolted on as a client side widget, which makes it the heaviest and least indexable thing the firm owns.

    Where inventory comes from a third party feed, it is usually rendered after the page has already loaded. The visitor sees a spinner, the crawler often sees nothing, and the one page that produces business is the one that performs worst.

    Render the list and each individual listing on the server so both a person and a crawler get real content. Give every building its own permanent URL with the address, submarket and asset type in it.

    Compress the media. Photographers export at print resolution, drone reels are enormous, and a flyer straight from a designer can be many times the weight of the entire page. Resize on upload rather than trusting whoever uploads.

    Test on a phone with two bars, not on office fiber. Your visitor is often sitting in a parking lot east of Aurora or driving in from the foothills, and a page that only performs on a fast connection is failing exactly when it matters.

    Somebody is going to print this page in a truck on the way to Golden

    Brokers and their clients still put paper in a folder, and most brokerage sites produce a printout nobody can use.

    Print styles are cheap relative to what else gets argued about in a redesign, and they are almost always skipped. Strip the navigation, keep the photos small, put the address and the broker's contact details at the top, and make sure the spec block survives the page break.

    Better still, generate the one page flyer from the same data that drives the listing page. When the flyer and the website come from one source they never disagree, which is otherwise a routine and embarrassing problem.

    Include the URL and a scannable code on the printed version so a landlord who picked up the sheet at a tour can get back to the live listing and see what changed.

    Give the same care to the emailed link. A large share of brokerage traffic arrives from a broker's email rather than a search, and the preview image and title are the first impression the client's committee sees.

    Questions we get

    Should our availability come from a portal feed or live on our own site?
    Both, with your own site as the source of record where possible. Portals give you reach, and a listing that only exists on a portal builds their domain instead of yours. Server rendered listing pages on your own domain also give brokers a link they control when the portal listing expires.
    Do we need a separate site or section for investment sales?
    Usually a distinct section rather than a separate site. The audience, the vocabulary and the follow up are different from occupier work, and a shared homepage tends to speak to one and confuse the other. Splitting domains generally divides your authority for no gain.
    How much building detail is safe to publish?
    Publish what the owner has disclosed, say where it came from, and stop before any conclusion. Descriptions of systems, dimensions and dates are fine. Statements about structural condition, code compliance or insurability are not, and those belong to a licensed engineer, the building department or the buyer's insurer.
    Is a map on the homepage worth the weight it adds?
    An interactive map is often the heaviest component on a brokerage site and rarely the thing that produces the inquiry. A static coverage image at the top with a full interactive map on the availability page is the usual compromise, and it keeps the first screen fast.
    What does the first month of an engagement look like?
    We start with the availability data, because that is where the money is. We ask for read access to whatever the inventory lives in now, whether that is a feed, a spreadsheet or the head of one broker, and we ask for an hour with somebody who fields occupier calls so the spec fields match the questions people actually ask. The first thing built is the listing template and the server rendered availability list. The homepage comes after that, because it is the easier argument and it should be shaped by what the listing pages turn out to need. After launch we look at the form submissions with you monthly for a quarter, then quarterly.
    Our brokers want their own microsites. Good idea?
    Generally no. Separate domains split your search authority and go stale the moment someone changes firms. Strong broker pages on the main site, with their listings, their submarkets and their content attached, serve the same purpose and keep the asset with the firm.

    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 .

    Talk to us about web design for commercial real estate firms in Denver

    Tell us about your business and where your marketing stands. We'll tell you what we'd do first, and what we'd leave alone.

    We won't add you to a mailing list. A person will reply.