Morgul Marketing

    What your listing pages must say before a tenant calls someone else

    A brokerage website has one job that matters: answer, without being asked, the three or four questions standing between a visitor and a phone call. In Louisville the first of those questions is geographic and most sites here fail it. A tenant rep in Chicago, an operations manager in Jeffersonville and an owner in Prospect all arrive on the same homepage and all three need to know whether you cover their side of the metro before anything else registers. Say it early, put real specifications on the listing pages, ask the right four things on the form, and stop letting scripts slow the site down.

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    The state line belongs above the fold, not on your about page

    A two state metro turns coverage into a real question rather than a formality, and the answer belongs on the first screen.

    Kentucky and Indiana in the same metro is unusual, and visitors treat it as a real question. A firm that lists in Jefferson, Oldham and Bullitt Counties and refers across the river should say exactly that on the first screen.

    Write it as a sentence, not as a map graphic. Maps are decorative and slow. A line reading "Industrial and office listings across Jefferson, Oldham and Bullitt Counties, and in Clark and Floyd Counties in Southern Indiana" does the work in two seconds.

    Keep any statement about licensing simple and accurate. Requirements differ by state, so what you publish is worth confirming with your broker of record before it goes live.

    Put the same line in the footer, because plenty of visitors arrive on a listing page and never see the homepage.

    Your visitor has three buildings open in three tabs, so make the specs comparable

    Nobody evaluates a building on your site alone, and the page that is easiest to compare wins the shortlist.

    An occupier shortlisting space opens several listings at once, often from different brokerages. Yours is being read against two others, in the same minute, on the same screen.

    That argues for a consistent specification block in a fixed order on every industrial listing: square footage, clear height, dock and drive-in counts, power service, column spacing, sprinkler type, year built, trailer parking. Same order, same place, every time.

    Prose paragraphs describing a building's charm lose that comparison instantly. Put the block first and the narrative underneath.

    Give every listing a clean print output and a downloadable flyer that matches the page. Brokers on the other side of a deal print things, and a flyer that contradicts the web page creates a phone call you do not want.

    Heating a 1900s brick building is the number nobody else will give an occupier

    Operating cost through a real winter is the question every reuse tenant asks on the second call, so answer it on the page.

    Older stock downtown and in the historic neighborhoods was not built for modern energy performance. An occupier looking at a brick warehouse in Butchertown or a storefront in Old Louisville is doing arithmetic about winter heating and cannot get the inputs anywhere.

    You can help without making claims. Publish the utility provider, the service type, the heating system and, where the owner will release it, historical usage. LG&E account history for a building is a fact, not an opinion.

    Do not publish a conclusion. Never write that a building is efficient, cheap to run, or adequately heated. Present the data and let the tenant's engineer draw the line.

    The same discipline applies to roof age, sprinkler coverage and floor loads. Link the reports. Do not summarize them in a marketing field.

    Ask whether they run a second shift before you ask for a budget

    The inquiry form is where a brokerage site either sorts its traffic or drowns in it.

    Four fields carry almost all of the weight here. Which county or city the requirement sits in. Square footage. Timing. Whether they operate outside standard hours.

    The last one surprises people. Shift work is ordinary in this metro, and a tenant running overnight has real constraints around access, neighbors, truck movement and permitted hours, so it changes which buildings you would send them. It also tells you when to call back.

    Skip the fields a broker will learn in the first two minutes of conversation anyway. Budget, credit, decision process and broker representation belong in a call, not in a form that is abandoned at field seven.

    Make the county or city a required, structured answer rather than free text. That is the design decision: the form either arrives sorted or it does not. What happens to it afterward, who owns it and how quickly they reply, is intake work rather than design work.

    Cut the third party scripts before you cut a single photograph

    Most slow brokerage sites are slow because of what they load around the content, not because of the content.

    Chat widgets, three analytics tags, a heat map tool, a font service, an embedded map, a social feed and a marketing automation script will together outweigh the photographs on a listing page.

    Audit them by asking who reads the output. Anything nobody has opened in three months comes off. Load what remains after the page renders, not before it.

    Then handle the images properly: sized for the layout, modern formats, and lazy loaded below the first screen. Full resolution site plans and drone footage belong behind a link, not in a hero.

    The audience for this is specific. An operations manager checking a listing from a phone between two sites is not going to wait, and a broker forwarding your link to a client does not want to apologize for it.

    Questions we get

    WordPress or a custom build?
    Whatever the person who knows the availability can update without help. Stale availability is the most common failure on brokerage sites, and it is almost always a permissions and workflow problem rather than a platform one. Pick the setup where your marketing coordinator can change a listing in five minutes.
    Should we integrate a commercial listing platform or manage listings on the site?
    If your inventory is small and turns slowly, managing it on the site gives you better pages and better control. If it is large, an integration saves duplicate entry but usually produces thinner pages, so plan to enrich the important listings by hand regardless.
    How many photographs does a listing page need?
    Enough to answer the questions a tour would answer: the dock face, the interior clear span, the office build out, the yard and the access. Fifty images of the same warehouse slow the page and help nobody. Depth of specification beats volume of photography every time.
    Should we gate the offering memorandum behind a form?
    A competitor will fill in a form to get your offering memorandum. A principal deciding whether you are worth a call often will not. A common middle path is an ungated flyer with full specifications and a short confidentiality step for the financials, which keeps the casual buyer moving and asks for identity only where it is warranted.
    What would you do first if we asked you to look at our site?
    Open three of your listings on a phone next to three from the firm you lose deals to, and write down where a reader would give up. That usually points at one of two things: a specification block that is not in a fixed order, or a template trying to carry a Butchertown brick warehouse and a distribution building at the same time. To start, send us a login, one industrial listing and one older reuse listing you would call typical, and the name of whoever currently marks a building leased. We would rather fix the template and the form than argue about the homepage.
    Do we need a separate page for landlords and owners?
    Yes, and it should read nothing like the tenant pages. An owner is evaluating how you would market their building, who would work it, and what the process looks like. Most brokerage sites have no such page at all, which makes it an easy piece of ground to take.

    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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