New York, NY

Publishing commercial property video in a city that controls the sidewalk

A lot of the commercial video made in this city is produced in a way the city does not really allow. Put a tripod on a sidewalk with a stand next to it and you are a production. The format that survives here is handheld, which turns out to suit the buildings anyway, because what a tenant needs to see in a prewar space is the walk from the door to the back, the stairs, the risers and the radiators. Add mixed use stock where the floors above the store are somebody's home, and an owner base across the outer boroughs doing business in languages your feed does not publish in, and the local half of a brokerage program in the five boroughs is settled before anybody writes a caption.

Your hands are the tripod, because the sidewalk is not yours

Street filming rules here choose your production style, and pretending otherwise gets a shoot moved along mid morning.

Handheld shooting without equipment on the ground is generally treated differently than a setup with tripods, stands or anything else occupying public space. The distinction is real and it is enforced, so confirm the current requirements with the city's film office before you build a format around either one.

The kit that results is a phone or a small camera, a gimbal, a clip microphone and nothing that touches the pavement. The constraint is not a compromise. Handheld walking video suits commercial space in this city better than static frames do, because the thing a viewer wants is the walk.

It also fits the blocks. There is no room across a narrow street to back up for a wide shot of a storefront, no space at the curb for a crew, and most of the good angles sit in the middle of a sidewalk that belongs to people trying to get somewhere.

So shoot for a different thing than a hero exterior. The useful piece is a continuous walk from the door, past the stairs, down to the cellar and back out, narrated by somebody who knows what a tenant is going to ask along the way.

Steam heat, column spacing and a stairwell that will not take the equipment

Prewar stock puts the deciding facts in plain sight, and a camera handles them better than a floor plan does.

Column spacing, floor loads, ceiling height under the beams, radiators and steam risers, a freight door opening onto a turn that nothing wide can make. Each one decides whether a tenant's fitout is possible, and each one is visible.

Film them deliberately. A slow pass along a bay showing where the columns land tells a tenant more about his layout than a plan will, and a shot of the radiator and the riser tells a restaurant operator what he is inheriting for heat before he prices a kitchen.

Stairs are the sharpest test in this city. A walk-up with a turn at the landing decides what equipment can ever go up, and showing it loses you the tenants who were never going to work while saving everybody a wasted visit.

Cellars deserve the same honesty. Head height, the stair down, where the service comes in and how much of the footprint is genuinely usable are what a ground floor tenant is really buying, and they are exactly what a listing photograph leaves out.

Rent stabilized units upstairs are not part of the commercial story

Mixed use is the ordinary small asset across the outer boroughs, and the residential half of it does not belong in a marketing post.

A building with a store below and apartments above may include rent-stabilized units. Anything published about who lives there, what they pay or what an owner intends can end up inside a conflict your firm is not a party to.

Keep the camera and the caption on the commercial space. The storefront, the cellar, the service entrance and the frontage. Where a listing requires the residential floors to be mentioned, they are a fact stated once and left alone.

Regulatory status is the owner's disclosure to make in the offering material, where it can be stated precisely with the paperwork behind it. A caption is the wrong instrument for it and a comment is a worse one.

The same rule holds in replies, which is where it usually goes wrong. A friendly line speculating about vacancy upstairs is a sentence with a long life, and taking the post down afterward does not shorten it.

The owner of a Sunset Park building does business in a language your feed does not

Whole categories of small commercial ownership across the outer boroughs run in languages no competing firm publishes in.

Owners of small mixed use and industrial buildings in Flushing, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge and parts of the Bronx work inside communities where the operating language is Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian or Arabic. The firms chasing those owners publish exclusively in English.

A broker who already works in one of those languages, recording the same explainer in it, is not a translation project. It is a second audience with almost no competition, made by somebody the audience can check on by asking around.

Vocabulary is the real work rather than translation. The words for a certificate of occupancy, a triple net bill or an alteration agreement do not carry cleanly, and an explainer built on the terms an owner actually hears from his accountant and his managing agent beats a polished subtitle track.

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

Questions we actually get

Do we really need a permit to film our own listings?: It depends on how you film. Handheld shooting is generally treated differently from a setup that occupies the sidewalk with tripods, stands or a crew. Since the difference decides whether a shoot gets stopped, confirm the current position with the city's film office and design the format around handheld work, which suits commercial space better anyway.
Our storefront has steam heat and old radiators. Does a tenant actually care?: A restaurant or fitness operator cares before he cares about the rent. What heats the space, where the risers run and what the landlord will let him touch decide the fitout budget. Show the radiator, the riser and the ceiling under the beams on camera, and you will spend the first call on his plan instead of on a description he could have watched.
Can we mention the apartments above the store in a listing post?: State only what the listing requires and leave it there. Some of those units may be rent-stabilized, and anything you publish about who lives upstairs, what they pay or what the owner intends can surface inside a dispute your firm is not part of. Regulatory status belongs in the offering material where it can be set out precisely, not in a caption or a reply.
One of our brokers works in Cantonese. Is a second language video worth the trouble?: It is probably the best return available to a firm working the outer boroughs. Owners of small mixed use and industrial buildings in Flushing, Sunset Park and parts of the Bronx do business in their own communities, and no competing firm is publishing for them. Have the broker record the explainer he already gives on the phone, in the vocabulary those owners use with their managing agents.
The space is a fourth floor walk-up loft. How do we film it without scaring everyone off?: Film the stairs first and say what they mean. A turn at the landing decides what furniture, equipment and inventory can ever come up, and a tenant who finds that out on the tour is annoyed while one who found it out on video is grateful. Then show the floor plate, the column spacing and the light, which is what makes prewar space worth the climb.

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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