Las Vegas, NV

Social media for a valley market that outsiders think is one road

Most of the people who could hire a brokerage here have never driven past the resort corridor. They know one road, they have watched it on a screen their whole lives, and they quietly believe it is the market. The buildings that actually trade sit in Henderson, North Las Vegas, Spring Valley and the southwest valley, strung along the 215 and the 15. A feed here has to show that valley to people who cannot picture it, work around the one place everybody expects you to film, and get right the two local facts that decide retail rent rolls and ownership costs: who holds a gaming license, and what is happening to the grass.

The one road everybody pictures is private property you cannot film

The most recognizable real estate in the country sits in the middle of this market, it belongs to somebody else, and none of your inventory is on it.

Resort properties are private property with their own security. A tripod, a gimbal or anything that reads as a crew gets approached quickly, and the conversation goes the way private property conversations go.

Commercial use of footage featuring an identifiable resort is a rights question rather than a courtesy. Licensees care how their property is depicted, and permission is a negotiation with people who negotiate for a living.

None of which costs you much, because the corridor is not where your buildings are. What a distribution tenant or a small bay buyer needs to see is the yard depth off the 215, the clear height out in Enterprise, the frontage in Henderson, and how long it really takes to get from one to the other.

Drive footage does work no rendering can. A clip that starts somewhere a stranger recognizes and runs out to the submarket, with the interchange named on the way, gives a buyer the one thing a spreadsheet cannot: a sense of where anything is.

Restricted gaming decides which retail suites a tenant can take

Neighborhood retail in this valley carries licensed gaming in places a broker from anywhere else would never expect it.

Taverns, convenience stores, groceries and route operators run machines under state licensing, and a location has to qualify before an operator can put them in. The tenant mix in an ordinary Clark County strip center is therefore shaped by something that does not exist in most markets.

Explain it, because everybody with money in retail here needs to understand it and almost nobody has written it down. Why one corner suite suits a tavern and the space two doors down does not, what the neighboring uses do to it, what the parking has to support, and how a rent roll reads differently once a licensed operator is in the corner.

Depiction is the licensee's call rather than the landlord's. A gaming operator answers to a regulator for how its floor appears in public, so the piece gets planned with the operator in the room instead of shown to them afterward.

Keep the content on the space and the trade area. Why the corner works, what the traffic pattern does at shift change, what the neighbors pull in. The building is the part you are qualified to talk about, and for this audience it is the part worth talking about.

Turf conversion turned the landscaping into a capital item worth filming

Water is a governing constraint in southern Nevada, and nonfunctional grass at commercial properties is going away by rule rather than by preference.

Ornamental turf across office parks, center frontages and common areas is being converted to desert landscaping on a timetable owners do not set. Turf removal is a capital project with design, irrigation and inspection in it, not a landscaping refresh.

An owner reading a rent roll from out of state has no idea any of it is coming. A short walk of a frontage that has already been converted, showing the drip lines, the rock, the trees that stayed and what the water use looks like afterward, answers an ownership question no listing photograph raises.

For a seller it is a selling point. A property that has finished its conversion has the cost behind it rather than in front of it, and a camera on the finished frontage says so more convincingly than a line in a flyer.

For a buyer still facing it, film the sequence. What gets surveyed, what the water authority's programs cover, who designs the replacement and roughly how long a property is torn up. Nobody in the valley has filmed that plainly and every owner watching wants to know.

The show weeks put your out of town buyers inside the valley

For a handful of weeks a year the capital, the lenders and the national tenant reps you have been publishing at are physically here.

Large conventions bring the people who buy at a distance into the valley on a schedule visible a year out. Nothing else in the calendar delivers a visiting principal to a room a few miles from your office.

So book the on camera conversation then. A recorded exchange with a lender, an institutional buyer or a national tenant rep about what they are underwriting in this market is material you cannot produce in any other week, and it does more for a firm's standing than a month of listing posts.

Plan around the corridor rather than through it. The 15 and the streets near the resorts stop being usable in those weeks, so an interview in a quiet room near where somebody is already staying will happen, and anything that needs a drive across the valley will not.

How to run the rest of the account, who is allowed to speak for the firm, what to do with a post that will not travel and how to judge whether the program is working, we have written out once at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media, which lets this page stay on the four things the valley does differently.

Questions we actually get

Can we film on the Strip or use footage of the resorts?: Assume not without permission. Resort properties are private, security moves quickly on anything that looks like a shoot, and commercial use of footage featuring an identifiable property is a rights question rather than a courtesy. Point the content at the submarkets you actually list in, which is where a buyer needs the help anyway, and let the corridor be somebody else's backdrop.
A tavern tenant in our center has gaming machines. Can we feature the space?: Feature the suite and the trade area, and plan the piece with the operator rather than around them. A licensed business answers to a regulator for how its floor is depicted in public, so their approval comes first and it is theirs to give, not the landlord's. What a retail audience wants from you anyway is why that corner qualifies for that use and what the parking and the neighbors support.
Our client just converted the turf at a center we are listing. Is that worth filming?: Yes, and it may be the most valuable two minutes on the property. Walk the converted frontage, show the drip lines, the rock and the trees that stayed, and say plainly that the cost is behind this property rather than in front of it. An owner shopping from another state does not know turf removal is coming for the comparable down the street.
When is it worth booking on camera interviews with people from outside the market?: The big convention weeks, because that is when they are here. A recorded conversation with a visiting lender, buyer or national tenant rep cannot be produced any other week of the year. Book it indoors and close to where they are staying, since the corridor and the 15 are not passable in a useful way while a large show is running.
Our industrial tenants mostly ship to the resorts. Does that belong in the content?: It belongs at the front of it. Demand in a lot of this valley's distribution space is downstream of hospitality operations, and a buyer underwriting a tenant from another state cannot see that in a lease abstract. Saying what a building serves, and what that does to how the tenant uses the yard and the dock, explains the rent better than the rent does.

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.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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