Morgul Marketing

    Tampa, FL

    Social media for a Tampa Bay brokerage where the two sides are different products

    A brokerage here works a metro that a bay splits into two unlike markets. Pinellas County is effectively built out, so a requirement there is a reuse conversation about an existing envelope. Hillsborough and Pasco still deliver ground-up product, so the same requirement across the water is a delivery conversation. The two sides are heard in different courts, the ground under a good part of the metro is soluble limestone, and the office and flex band around MacDill Air Force Base holds tenants who will not be named in anything. A channel that is honest about all four of those is worth running. One that averages them is a Tampa Bay name over a single-county firm.

    Pinellas ran out of land and Hillsborough did not

    One county is effectively built out and the other still absorbs greenfield, so a single firm is selling redevelopment on one side of the bay and new construction on the other.

    Pinellas County is among the most densely developed counties in the state and has close to nothing left to build on. A tenant who needs space in Clearwater, Largo or Pinellas Park is looking at a teardown, a conversion or a backfill, and the deal turns on an existing envelope, a parking count and what the site can realistically be brought up to.

    Cross the Howard Frankland and the answer changes. Hillsborough, and Pasco above it, still deliver ground-up product, and a requirement in Riverview, Brandon or Wesley Chapel can be met with a building that does not exist yet.

    So the two markets need different material even though the firm is one firm. On the Pinellas side, reuse: what a former retail box will take, what the parking ratio allows, what a roof and a slab of that age mean for a fit-out and what it costs in time. On the Hillsborough side, delivery: sites, timing, what is under construction and when it takes tenants.

    Running one story across both is the fastest way to sound like a firm that works one side. An owner in Dunedin reading about new delivery has nothing to do with it, and a developer in Wesley Chapel reading about adaptive reuse has exactly the same problem.

    Two circuits split this metro, so the landlord explainer gets written twice

    Hillsborough matters run through the Thirteenth and Pinellas through the Sixth, so two landlords twenty minutes apart do not get the same answer about timing.

    The metro spans two judicial circuits. Hillsborough County sits in the Thirteenth, Pinellas and Pasco in the Sixth, both under the Second District Court of Appeal. Local procedure, scheduling and practice differ enough that the honest answer to a landlord's question about how long something takes depends on which side of the bay the property is on.

    Small commercial landlords ask about that constantly, and it is one of the few subjects a brokerage can write about that a landlord genuinely saves. What the sequence looks like, what tends to set the pace, and what a landlord is usually expected to have ready before anything starts.

    Write it twice, once per circuit, and say which one each version covers. A single metro-wide piece is wrong for half the audience, and the half it is wrong for is the half most likely to notice and least likely to say so.

    A firm that finds it can only write one of the two versions has learned something useful about where its coverage actually stops, which is worth more than the piece it was trying to publish.

    The subsidence explainer works because no address is attached to it

    West-central Florida sits on soluble limestone, so a geotechnical step sits inside deals here that a buyer from elsewhere has never had to do.

    Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties make up the part of the state where subsidence is an ordinary part of diligence rather than a curiosity. It shows up in what a lender asks for, in how insurance gets quoted, in the scope of a geotechnical report and in how a slab and a foundation are designed.

    A buyer arriving from another state has priced none of that and usually meets it late, from a lender, at an awkward moment. A firm that explains the sequence before it becomes anybody's crisis is the firm that gets called on the next one.

    Publish it with no building attached. What a report generally covers, what a lender tends to want to see, why the counties are not treated the same way, and what the words on a survey mean. Written about a named listing, the identical material turns into a claim about that listing, which is not what anybody set out to make.

    Then let brokers send the link during diligence instead of explaining it again on every call. Evergreen material of that kind keeps earning for years in a metro that takes in new arrivals continuously.

    A cleared tenant near MacDill will not let you announce the lease

    The defense work around the base brings tenants whose occupancy, layout and sometimes address are not marketing material at all.

    MacDill Air Force Base anchors a defense and contractor economy across South Tampa and out along the interstate, and a share of the office and flex leasing in that band is done by firms holding contracts and clearances. Some will not confirm publicly where they sit, and none of them will let a camera into a secured area inside a suite.

    The practical effect is a submarket where the deal announcement, the standard format for a brokerage everywhere else, mostly does not exist. A firm working that band cannot build a calendar on closings, because a good share of them will never be publishable and the rest will be publishable without a tenant name on them.

    So build the content around the building instead. Base building condition, floor plate, power, parking ratio and drive time to the gate. That last one carries more weight here than it sounds, because contractor staff run to and from the base during the day and a corridor that adds fifteen minutes at four in the afternoon takes a building out of contention.

    Timing is its own constraint. Requirements in that band move with contract awards and recompetes rather than with the ordinary leasing year, so a market piece published on the usual cycle can miss the weeks those tenants are actually looking. The arguments that hold for a brokerage in any market, platform choices, approval habits and where a budget goes, are set out at /industries/commercial-real-estate/social-media, and what is above is the Tampa Bay part.

    Questions we actually get

    Does a Pinellas tenant need different material from a Hillsborough one?
    Yes, because they are looking at different things. Pinellas is essentially built out, so the useful content is about reuse: what a former retail box will take, what the parking ratio permits, what a slab and roof of that age mean for a fit-out and how long it adds. Hillsborough and Pasco still deliver ground-up, so the useful content there is sites, construction timing and when a building takes tenants. One piece cannot do both jobs.
    Do we really need two versions of our landlord material?
    If it touches timing, yes. Hillsborough sits in the Thirteenth circuit and Pinellas and Pasco in the Sixth, and procedure and scheduling differ enough that a single metro-wide answer is wrong for half the audience. Write the sequence twice, label each version with the circuit it covers, and keep both general. Landlords save that kind of material, which means the wrong version circulates just as long as the right one.
    How much should we say about sinkholes without frightening buyers off?
    Explain the process rather than the risk, and keep it off any named building. What a geotechnical report generally covers, what a lender usually asks for, how insurance tends to be handled in these counties and what the terms on a survey mean. Buyers from other states are far more unsettled by hearing it late from a lender than by reading a clear explanation from their broker first. Written about a specific listing, the same words become a claim about that listing.
    A tenant near MacDill will not be named. Is the deal worth any content at all?
    The deal is not, but the building is. Publish the base building, the floor plate, power, parking ratio and drive time to the gate, and treat the unnamed closing as a normal outcome in that submarket rather than a marketing failure. Firms that work that band successfully accept that a good share of their best work never appears anywhere, and they build the calendar on buildings and submarket conditions instead of closings.
    A tenant offered to record a testimonial in uniform. Can we use it?
    No. A service member cannot appear in uniform endorsing a business, however willingly it is offered, and a brokerage should not be the one who lets that go out. If the person still wants to help, take it in writing without the uniform, without the unit and without anything that identifies their work, and expect their employer to have a view on it too.

    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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