Morgul Marketing

    Miami, FL

    Social media for a Miami brokerage where the wall, the chiller and the language are not yours

    A Miami-Dade brokerage works with a few things most markets never hand a firm. The county runs its own approval for the building envelope, so the paperwork behind a window or a roof assembly is part of the asset. Much of the leasable tower space sits in condominium, which puts the corridors, the chiller and the assessment schedule under an association rather than under your landlord. The walls in Wynwood are commissioned artwork owned by the people who painted them. And the audience is heard in Spanish and Creole as often as in English, by people who can tell within seconds whether the person speaking actually holds the language.

    The market can hear which Spanish you are speaking

    A translated caption is not Spanish-language content, and an audience in Doral, Hialeah and Coral Gables works that out in about four seconds.

    Spanish-language material works here when somebody who genuinely speaks it is on camera saying something they know. It fails when an English script is read phonetically by a broker who does not, and that failure is worse than staying in English, because it reads as a firm performing local knowledge it does not have.

    Origin matters too. Miami's Spanish is not one accent or one vocabulary, and a Venezuelan owner, a Colombian family office and an Argentine developer all hear the difference. Cast the broker who fits the audience for that asset class rather than assuming one recording covers the county.

    Haitian Creole is the gap almost nobody is filling. There is real ownership and real tenancy in Little Haiti and north of it, and very little commercial material addressed to any of it. If somebody on the team speaks it well, that is an opening rather than a box to tick.

    Whatever gets recorded, carry the same substance into each language instead of adding a short courtesy version in the second one. A thin translation tells a viewer exactly which audience the firm takes seriously.

    In Wynwood the wall behind your listing belongs to the artist

    Wynwood and the Design District are wrapped in commissioned work, so a leasing video that frames a storefront frames somebody else's painting.

    The exterior walls in Wynwood carry commissioned murals with named artists behind them, painted under agreements between those artists and the building owners. A brokerage filming a retail bay there puts that work into a piece made to sell space and carrying the firm's name on it.

    Where the rights are unclear, frame tighter. The bay, the transom, the roll-up door, the ceiling, the interior, the frontage width. A Wynwood retail space is taken on frontage and height anyway, and the mural is the neighborhood's asset rather than the building's.

    Where the shot really is the wall, the building owner is the place to start and often not the place it ends, because the artist's permission is a separate conversation the owner cannot have on your behalf.

    The Design District poses the same problem in a different form, with installations and storefront treatments belonging to the tenants and to the district rather than to your listing. Treat the streetscape in both places as somebody else's property until an owner tells you otherwise.

    In an office condominium the suite and the tower are two different sales

    Much of Miami's leasable tower space sits in condominium, so the corridors, the chiller and the assessment schedule belong to an association rather than to the owner who signed your listing.

    A Brickell or Edgewater tower is frequently a condominium, and the owner signing your listing agreement owns a unit inside it. The lobby, the elevators, the amenity deck and the chilled water plant belong to the association, and so do the assessment schedule and the rules on cooling after hours.

    A tenant asking what it costs to run a suite past six in the evening is asking something the landlord cannot answer alone. Packaged terminal units in an older building and central chilled water in a newer one give completely different answers, and in both cases the association sets the hours and the charge.

    So the leasing content has to separate the two. What the unit owner controls, what the association controls, and where the tenant's operating cost actually comes from. Laying that out plainly is the thing a tenant rep from another market most needs and least expects to be handed.

    It changes what a market piece is worth as well. A tower with an assessment running is a different product this quarter than it was last, and a leasing video that talks only about the view is talking past the person doing the underwriting.

    In this county the approval file is the content

    Miami-Dade sits in the High Velocity Hurricane Zone, so the glazing, doors and roof assemblies in a building carry approval documents that exist in almost no other market.

    Miami-Dade and the county above it make up the High Velocity Hurricane Zone, and envelope products used here carry a Notice of Acceptance issued through Product Control, with large-missile testing behind it. Owners hold those documents. Most listing packages never mention them.

    Put the file in the package. Where an owner has acceptance documents for the glazing and the roof, a short piece that shows them answers the first question an out-of-market tenant rep, lender or insurer asks about a Miami building, and it answers with paper rather than with adjectives.

    Where the owner cannot find them, that is worth learning before the space goes to market rather than during diligence, and it is a reason to lead the content with something else while it gets sorted out.

    It also gives the firm something to publish that is not a listing. What the county's product approval covers, why it exists here and not an hour north, and what an owner ought to keep in a file. Occupiers arriving from other states read that once and remember which firm wrote it. The arguments that hold for a brokerage in any market, platform choices, approval habits and where a budget goes, are written up at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media, and the Miami-Dade half of the job is the part above.

    Questions we actually get

    Can we use footage of a Wynwood mural in a listing video?
    Not on the assumption that the building owner controls it. Those walls are commissioned work with artists behind them, and an owner's agreement may or may not cover somebody else using images of it commercially. The practical answer for most shoots is to frame tighter and sell the space on frontage, height and the bay itself. If the wall really is the shot, start with the owner and expect the artist to be a separate conversation.
    A tenant asks what after-hours cooling costs in a Brickell tower. What can we publish?
    Publish the structure, not a figure. Say whether the building runs central chilled water or packaged terminal units, say that hours and charges for common plant are set by the association rather than by the unit owner, and say where the tenant will get the current schedule. The structure is genuinely useful, and saying it is honest about the fact that the landlord cannot set the number. A number in a caption becomes a representation the tenant will hold you to.
    Should Notice of Acceptance documents show up in our marketing?
    Where the owner has them, yes. Envelope products in the High Velocity Hurricane Zone carry approvals through Product Control, and a buyer or occupier arriving from another state usually hears the term first from a lender. A short piece showing what the owner holds answers the question before it becomes a delay. Where the documents are missing, keep that off the feed and get it resolved before the space is marketed hard.
    How do we handle Spanish without ending up with something that reads badly?
    Cast rather than translate. Put a broker who speaks the language on camera and let them say it in their own words, then have a native speaker review anything written. A translated caption under an English video is usually worse than no Spanish at all, because the audience it was aimed at can tell immediately and draws a conclusion about the firm from it.
    Is Haitian Creole worth doing if only one person on the team speaks it?
    It is, and one person is enough to start. There is real ownership and tenancy in Little Haiti and north of it, and almost no commercial content addressed to any of it, so the bar is low and the recognition is high. Give that person a repeating format they can hold, and keep the substance identical to the English version rather than making a short courtesy piece.

    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 Miami

    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.