Morgul Marketing

    A brokerage site people land on one building at a time

    Almost nobody enters a brokerage site through the front door. They arrive on a single building page from an email, a portal link, a text message or a search result, look at it for a few seconds on a phone, and decide whether your firm is worth a reply. Design work that assumes a homepage visit and a patient reader is designing for a visitor who does not exist. The site has to prove coverage, show condition, and make contact easy from whatever page the reader happened to land on, at whatever speed their connection allows in a car between showings.

    Talk to us

    Every building page is a home page, because that is where people land

    The listing page carries the entire first impression, so it has to do the work your homepage was designed to do.

    A reader who lands on a building in Chesterfield has no idea whether your firm is a two person shop or the largest team in the region, whether you work the City of St. Louis as well as the county, or whether you can act across the river.

    Put the answers on the page itself rather than behind navigation. A short line naming the territories you cover, the asset classes you trade, and a named broker with a direct number does more than a polished about page nobody opens.

    Header navigation is not a substitute. On a phone it collapses into a menu icon, and readers judging a building do not go exploring before they decide whether to write to you.

    Treat the availability index as the second most important template, because the reader who does move deeper almost always goes there next. Fast, filterable, current, and honest about what has already gone.

    The same facts in the same order on every building you list

    Consistency across listings is worth more than richness on any single one, because readers compare.

    Decide on the fact block once and apply it everywhere: municipality and county, size, year built, construction type, clear height or ceiling, loading, parking, power service, current use, availability date. Same fields, same order, every time.

    Naming the municipality matters more here than in most markets. An address in Webster Groves, Kirkwood or University City tells a local reader something a street number does not, and tells an out of town reader which government they will be dealing with.

    Publish documents rather than adjectives. Link the survey, the site plan, the roof report or the masonry inspection where you have them and are permitted to share them, and let readers draw their own conclusions.

    Never let a marketing field state a conclusion about condition, zoning or permitted use. Describe what exists, note what is generally involved, and tell readers to confirm with the local building department, their insurer or their own counsel.

    Ask whether the Illinois side is on the table, and half your qualification is done

    One question about the state line separates a real requirement from a browser faster than nine fields ever will.

    A short form that asks the right things beats a long one that asks what a broker would find out on the first call anyway. Four or five fields is usually the ceiling before completion falls off.

    The fields that earn their place here are jurisdiction, size, timing and decision authority. Jurisdiction should be a set of choices rather than a text box: the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, the Metro East, or no preference.

    The Illinois option does two jobs. It routes the inquiry to someone licensed to act there, and it tells you immediately whether the requirement is geographically flexible, which changes how you respond.

    Everything else can wait. Budget, use, employee count and parking needs are conversation topics, and asking for them on a phone form is how a serious requirement becomes an abandoned form.

    The listing page has to print for a landlord meeting

    Brokers still print, and a page that prints to five broken pages loses you the room.

    A listing page ends up in a landlord pitch, a lender packet or a tenant's internal circulation more often than most marketing teams realize. It gets printed, saved as a PDF and forwarded.

    A print stylesheet takes an afternoon. Hide the navigation, the cookie notice and the map widget, keep the photographs at reasonable size, put the address and broker contact at the top, and make sure the fact block stays intact.

    Give every building a stable URL that will still resolve in a year. Redirect leased and sold buildings to something useful rather than deleting them, because those links live on in inboxes long after the deal closes.

    The same discipline helps when the page is pasted into an email. Set the preview image and description deliberately so a forwarded link shows the building rather than your logo.

    The other reader is a producer deciding where to take their book

    A brokerage site recruits as much as it sells, and most of them are built as though it does not.

    Experienced brokers considering a move look at your site the same night they take the call. They are checking inventory depth, whether marketing support is real, and whether the firm looks like somewhere their clients would be comfortable.

    Which means the availability page, the market commentary and the broker bios are recruiting assets. A team page sorted by territory rather than title tells a producer where the gaps are, which is exactly what he is looking for.

    Say what a broker gets. Marketing production, research, administrative support, technology, and how listings are staffed. Vague statements about culture do nothing for a reader running a business inside yours.

    Keep it separate from the client path so it does not clutter the buying experience, but do not bury it four levels down. One clear route from the team page is enough.

    Questions we get

    Should we build the site around our listings or around our services?
    Around listings, in almost every case. Inventory is what people arrive for, link to and forward, and service pages get read mainly by owners who are already considering you. Build the availability index and the building template first and hold them to a high standard, then write service pages that link into real inventory rather than sitting on their own.
    Our listings feed comes from a portal. Can we still control the pages?
    Usually yes, though it depends on the feed. Even where the core data arrives automatically, most firms can add their own fields, documents, municipality names and broker commentary on top. The parts you write are what differentiate the page from the identical record sitting on several national sites, so the template should be designed to make adding them easy rather than optional.
    How much detail can we safely publish about a building's condition?
    Publish facts and documents, not conclusions. Stating a roof was replaced in a given year, or linking an inspection report you are permitted to share, is different from asserting a building is sound. Structural questions belong with a licensed engineer, and code, insurance and permitted use questions are worth confirming with the local building department, your insurer or your own counsel. Keep marketing copy descriptive.
    Do we need a separate mobile site?
    No, but you need a site designed for a phone first, because that is where most listing links get opened. Separate mobile sites create maintenance and indexing problems. What matters is that the first screen renders quickly without waiting on scripts, that contact is one tap, and that the fact block is readable without pinching.
    How often should availability pages be updated?
    As close to immediately as your process allows, and the design should make that possible. Stale availability is the fastest way to lose a serious reader, and a building that leased two months ago still showing as available costs you credibility with the exact person you wanted. Whoever knows the status should be able to change it without filing a ticket.

    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 .

    Talk to us about web design for commercial real estate firms in St. Louis

    Tell us about your business and where your marketing stands. We'll tell you what we'd do first, and what we'd leave alone.

    We won't add you to a mailing list. A person will reply.