Out of state capital reads your site before it reads your listings
The first screen has to establish which parishes you work and what you trade, because a visitor from anywhere else cannot infer either.
An investor in another state does not know whether Slidell is your market or an hour outside it. They do not know whether you do industrial, retail, office or all three. If the top of the page is a photograph and a tagline, they leave with the question they arrived with.
Say it in words: the parishes, the submarkets, the asset classes. Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany mean something precise to a local reader and are easy for anyone else to look up. A hero image of a wrought iron balcony means nothing to either.
Give that audience something to read besides inventory. A short, honest market note under your own name is what a capital allocator forward internally, and it is the page that makes a cold call from your firm warm.
Publish nothing you would not defend in a meeting. Vague market commentary assembled from national sources reads exactly like what it is.
Photograph the access and the loading when the building sits on piers
Much of the older stock here is raised rather than slab, and the practical questions that follow belong in the listing template.
Steps, ramps, clearance underneath, where equipment sits, how a delivery reaches the door, whether parking is under or beside the structure. A tenant with a fit out in mind is working through all of it, and a facade shot answers none of it.
Build the template so those fields exist and are easy for whoever maintains listings to fill. Fields that are hard to fill stay empty, and an empty field reads as an evasion.
Describe conditions, never conclude about them. A marketing page should not characterize a foundation, a slab or a structure. Note what is observable, and say that anything structural is worth a licensed engineer's opinion.
Where a property is subject to historic district review, say so on the card rather than burying it. Tenants who cannot live with review self select out, which saves everybody a tour.
Availability has to render before the photography does, on cell service near the river
The person who most needs your site is outdoors on a phone, and the page they get is the one that finished loading.
Serve text first. Address, parish, submarket, size, use, availability and contact should be readable before a single image resolves. Everything visual comes after.
Offering flyers and site plans are the usual culprits. A large PDF or a full resolution site plan is a download, not a page, and it should be a clearly labeled link rather than something the browser has to render before anyone sees a rent line.
Map widgets are heavier than they look and often block the rest of the page while they initialize. Load the map after the content, or on a click.
Video of the skyline or the Quarter costs you more than it earns. Nobody has ever leased a building because a website panned across a streetscape, and the visitor who left while it buffered is not coming back.
The Quarter and Garden District templates need an exterior review line, carefully worded
Historic district review is the first practical question a retail tenant asks, so the template should hold the answer instead of the broker's memory.
Signage, awnings, glazing, lighting and paint are where a build out plan meets a review process. A single well written explainer, linked from every affected listing, answers it once for every tenant who will ever ask.
Hedge it properly. Say that requirements and review timing are worth confirming with the relevant commission or the city, and that a specific plan needs a specific answer. A brokerage site is not the place for a determination.
Owners considering adaptive reuse of an older building read the same page from the other direction. One asset, two audiences, and neither is served by a paragraph buried in a blog archive.
An inquiry that arrives without a use is a callback you will make twice
The form should collect the handful of answers that decide who calls back and what they say.
Use, size, parish and target date. Four answers turn a name and an email into a call worth having. Add a single free text box for anything else and stop there.
Skip the fields a broker will establish in the first two minutes anyway. Budget ranges, company size and how they heard about you cost you completions and buy you nothing your broker cannot ask.
Separate the paths. An owner asking what a building might be worth, a tenant with a requirement and an investor looking for product need different first replies, and one shared form guarantees all three get the wrong one.
Put a phone number next to the form and make it tappable. A meaningful share of commercial inquiries never touch a form at all, and a number rendered as an image is a lost deal you will never see in analytics.
A dropdown labeled County is the tell, and buyers here read it
Small vocabulary failures signal that the site, and possibly the firm, was assembled somewhere else.
Louisiana has parishes. A filter, a form field or a footer that says county came from a template, and everyone local knows it. Fixing it takes an afternoon and it changes how the whole site reads.
The same discipline applies to your written material. Louisiana runs on civil law rather than the common law that nearly all syndicated commercial real estate content assumes, so a purchased explainer about leases or transactions can be wrong here rather than merely generic. Write your own and have your counsel read it.
Say what you actually do and where. A firm that names its parishes, names its submarkets and shows work in them does not need to describe itself as a trusted partner. The specifics do that job better.
Questions we actually get
- Should our availability live on our site or on the portals?
- Both, but the version on your site is the one you control. Portals will always have more inventory and better distribution. Your site should hold the buildings you represent, with the fields that matter here filled in and kept current, because that is the page you send in an email and the page an owner checks before a listing presentation. Stale availability is the fastest way to lose both.
- How much of the site should a broker be able to edit without calling us?
- Availability, at minimum. Whoever knows a building has come off the market has to be able to change it that day without filing a request. Everything else can go through a slower process. A site where updating a listing requires an agency ticket ends up out of date within a season, and out of date is worse than plain.
- Do we need separate pages for each parish?
- For the parishes you genuinely transact in, yes, and for their submarkets where you have work to show. Each page needs something a portal cannot copy: your listings, your read on the submarket, buildings you have handled. Pages that only restate a place name do not help visitors and do not last.
- Can the site say anything about flooding, drainage or building condition?
- Describe, do not conclude. Note what is documented and observable, then point people to the professionals who can answer their question: a licensed engineer for anything structural, their insurer for coverage, the local building department or their own counsel for what is permitted. A marketing page that makes a determination creates a liability for the firm and helps no one.
- Is a redesign worth it if our inquiry volume is already decent?
- Sometimes the better project is smaller. Speed on the listing template, a form that asks the right four things, availability that is easy to update and the parish vocabulary fixed will often outperform a full rebuild and cost a fraction of it. We would rather look at what your current site is losing and fix that first than sell you a new one on principle.
