Morgul Marketing

    Orlando, FL

    Social media for an Orlando brokerage whose buyer has never stood on the site

    Commercial property in Central Florida is bought by people who are not in Central Florida. Hotel ownership on International Drive, small-bay industrial along the I-4 corridor and the nightly-rental corridor running toward Kissimmee, Celebration and Davenport are largely held from other states. The buyer cannot drive past the building, cannot see the approach road and cannot tell what the neighbors do all day. Meanwhile the metro's largest demand generators are trademarked businesses nobody in your office owns, and the newest submarkets are being leased against rooftops that are still permits. Below is what a brokerage here should put on a feed, and what it has to leave off.

    In the Davenport corridor the asset is a business, not a house

    The investor corridor toward Kissimmee, Celebration, Davenport and ChampionsGate trades residential-looking property that gets underwritten as an operating business.

    A resort-community house near ChampionsGate with eight or nine bedrooms is not competing with family homes. It is competing with other nightly-rental inventory, and the buyer is underwriting occupancy, management fees, resort dues, pool heat and the community's own rules about renting.

    So the content aimed at that buyer has to be operating content. What the community permits, what the management agreement covers, what the dues include, how the pool and the game room are handled, and what a turn between guests actually involves. A gallery of interiors answers none of it.

    Legal use varies over short distances. Orlando runs its own boundary and registration for home sharing, Orange County and Osceola County treat the question their own way, and two communities inside one county can differ from each other. The variation is a content problem before it is anything else, because a single explainer written for the metro will be wrong for a good share of the people reading it.

    Write by community rather than by metro. A piece about ChampionsGate, a piece about Celebration, a piece about the Davenport side of the county line. Buyers are choosing between those places specifically, and a general Central Florida post reads like somebody who has not been to any of them.

    The parks' names are not yours to borrow

    The metro's demand generators are trademarked businesses that are not your client, so a leasing post leaning on them is using property the firm does not have.

    Nearly every commercial pitch here wants to say how close a property sits to the attractions. The names, the logos and the characters belong to the operators, they are protected carefully, and a brokerage's marketing is commercial use of them.

    Write around it. Distance to International Drive, to the convention center, to the interchange, to the corridor, and drive times a tenant can verify. Those are the facts a hotel or retail operator underwrites anyway, and they keep the firm's marketing out of somebody else's legal department.

    The same restraint applies to footage. A shoot that picks up park signage, a gate, a monorail or a costumed character has captured material the firm cannot license by asking politely, and the piece it was cut into usually cannot be repaired afterward.

    It improves the work as well. A hotel investor on International Drive is not moved by a logo. They are asking about demand generators, group versus transient mix, the shape of the convention calendar and what the corridor's supply pipeline looks like, and a firm that talks that way sounds like the one that trades there.

    Horizon West leases pads the rooftops have not caught up to

    In the fastest-building parts of Orange and Osceola, a retail pad is marketed against houses that are permitted rather than occupied.

    Horizon West, Lake Nona and the Osceola corridor are still under construction, and a retail or medical pad there is underwritten on rooftops that exist on a phasing plan. Every photograph is graded dirt and a road cut.

    So the content has to carry the schedule instead of the scenery. Which phase is under construction, which is permitted, where the road connections land, what has opened nearby, and when the next wave of residential closings arrives. A committee approving a store is approving a forecast, and the forecast is what they are reading.

    Say plainly what is not there yet. A tenant who arrives to find the anchor unbuilt and the connector road unopened remembers whose video made it look finished, and site selectors talk to each other far more than owners assume.

    Then contrast it with Winter Park, Maitland or Ocoee, where the rooftops are already in place and the real question is who the trade area shops. The same firm marketing both needs two kinds of piece, and running the growth story on an established corridor makes a brokerage sound unfamiliar with it.

    A buyer in another state watches the walkthrough instead of booking a flight

    Ownership in this metro is heavily out of state, so a long, plain, narrated walk does the job a drive-by does everywhere else.

    Hotel ownership on International Drive, small-bay industrial along the I-4 corridor and the investor-owned corridor toward Kissimmee are mostly held from somewhere else. None of those owners can see the approach road, the neighbors, the condition or the traffic without the brokerage showing them.

    So make the long version first. A slow narrated walk of the site, the approach, the surrounding uses and the parts a flyer leaves out, the unflattering ones included. It is being used as evidence rather than entertainment, and length is far less of a problem than people assume for a viewer deciding whether to spend a day traveling.

    Show what a remote buyer cannot check. Loading, parking counted by eye, deferred maintenance, what the neighboring tenants do all day, how the site is entered from the road at five in the afternoon. Those are the details that make somebody book the flight or quietly pass.

    Cut the short clip out of the same footage rather than shooting twice. The parts of this that do not change from one market to another, what belongs on which platform, who approves an announcement and where a budget goes, are set out at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media, and what is above is the Central Florida half.

    Questions we actually get

    Can we say a property is minutes from the theme parks?
    Describe the geography instead of the brands. Distance to International Drive, to the convention center, to the nearest interchange, and a drive time somebody can check for themselves. The names, logos and characters belong to the operators and your marketing is commercial use of them. Operators underwrite the corridor and the interchange anyway, so nothing useful is lost by leaving the marks out.
    How do we market a Horizon West pad when nothing around it is built?
    Sell the schedule and be exact about it. Which residential phase is under construction, which is permitted, when the connector roads open, what has already opened nearby, and when closings start landing. Show the dirt honestly rather than shooting around it. The tenant committee is approving a forecast, and a video that implies a finished trade area is the thing they will remember when they arrive and find it empty.
    What should a listing for a ChampionsGate nightly-rental house actually show?
    The operation. Bedroom and bathroom count as inventory, the pool and its heating, the game room, what the resort dues cover, what the community permits, what a management agreement typically handles and what a turn between guests looks like. Buyers are underwriting a business, so the interiors are the least interesting part of the file to them and the operating detail is the part nobody else bothers to publish.
    How long should a property video be?
    Longer than instinct suggests, for the remote buyer. A slow narrated walk running several minutes gets watched all the way through by somebody deciding whether to book a flight, because it is doing the work of a site visit. Cut a short clip from the same footage for the feed. The common mistake is making only the short one and then wondering why serious buyers keep asking for more before they will travel.
    A hotel investor asked about the convention calendar. Should we publish that analysis?
    Yes, because it is the underwriting question in this metro and very few brokerages answer it in public. Talk about the shape of the year, group versus transient mix, what the supply pipeline along the corridor looks like and how a property is positioned against it. Keep the operators' marks out of it and stick to what you can point at, and the piece becomes the thing an out-of-state investor forwards to their partner.

    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.

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