Morgul Marketing

    A brokerage site built for two county inventory and a phone on the Gandy

    A commercial brokerage site in this metro has a problem before it has a design problem: the visitor usually cannot tell which side of the water a building sits on, and that one fact governs drive time, taxes, permitting and which broker should be answering. Most people arrive from a forwarded link, on a phone, holding a specification in their head and no map of the region. The site has a great deal of work to do in about eight seconds. What follows is the data model we would use, the fields a listing card needs in this market, how the inquiry should route, and what the site ought to refuse to publish at all.

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    Put the county on the listing card, above the rent line

    An address means nothing to a large share of your audience, and the county is the fastest way to tell someone whether a building is even in their world.

    A relocating occupier reading a card for an address in Largo has no way to know it is across the bay from your downtown inventory. A local investor knows immediately. Design for the first reader and the second one loses nothing.

    Every card should carry the county, the submarket name people actually use, the asset class, and the size. Rent can sit below all of that. Someone scanning twelve cards is filtering on geography and fit, not price, and giving them the filter fields first shortens the scan.

    Add a plain drive context line where it helps, such as minutes to the interstate or to the port, and keep it honest about traffic. Overstating a drive time in this metro gets found out on the first tour.

    The same fields feed your search filters, your emails and your listing exports, so getting the data model right once pays across every surface the firm uses.

    An Ybor City reuse listing needs a different template than a Brandon box

    Older stock and modern distribution product sell on entirely different information, and one template forced across both will misrepresent whichever it was not designed for.

    A distribution building sells on specification. Clear height, dock and grade doors, power service, column spacing, truck court, floor. Put those in a fixed table so a tenant rep can compare four buildings in ninety seconds.

    A restored masonry building in Ybor City or a converted storefront in St. Petersburg sells on character and on what can be done with it. Photography carries more weight, floor plates matter more than clear height, and the honest note about what the space would need for a given use belongs high in the page.

    Build both templates from the same data model with different visible fields rather than as separate systems. Two templates a content editor can choose between will stay current. Two websites will not.

    Where a building has a reuse question attached, link to the documents and let them speak. Summarizing a consultant's report in a marketing field is how a brokerage inherits a problem that was never theirs.

    Build for a phone on the Gandy at five, not for office fiber

    Your listing pages are opened between tours, in a truck, on a connection that is not the one your designer tested on.

    Set a weight budget before design starts and hold everyone to it. Hero video, an eager map widget and a gallery that loads forty full resolution images before anyone scrolls will each cost you more than any layout decision.

    Load the map on interaction rather than on page load. Most visitors never touch it, and the ones who do will wait a second for something they asked for.

    Compress and size images properly, serve modern formats, and defer everything below the fold. A gallery should load the first two images and fetch the rest as the visitor moves.

    Test on a mid range phone on a throttled connection, not on a laptop in the office. The difference between a page that opens in two seconds and one that opens in seven is the difference between a forwarded link that gets read and one that gets closed.

    Sort the team page by territory, not by title

    The most common failure on a brokerage site is a visitor with a Pinellas requirement choosing a broker from a grid arranged by seniority.

    Organize brokers by county and asset class, and say so in the heading of each group. Someone with a Clearwater warehouse requirement should be able to find the right person without knowing anybody's name.

    Give every broker a real page. Bios are among the highest converting pages a brokerage owns, because people search for the individual after a referral and land on a page that either confirms the recommendation or undermines it.

    Put direct contact details on the bio, including a mobile number if the broker will publish one. A general inquiry form is a delay mechanism, and a principal who has already decided who to call will not use it.

    List the submarkets each broker works. Claiming the whole metro on every bio is transparent, and it routes inquiries badly on top of that.

    Questions we get

    Should the availability data live in the website or in a listing platform?
    In whichever system the person who knows the truth will actually update, with the website reading from it. Most brokerages end up with a simple content system their marketing coordinator owns, feeding both the site and exports. A beautiful bespoke site that only a developer can edit goes stale within a quarter, and stale availability costs more than the design ever earned.
    How much should a brokerage site cost and how long does it take?
    It scales with the data model and the number of templates, not with the number of pages. We would rather scope it after seeing your inventory, your export requirements and how your team works than quote a number that has to be revised. What we can say is that the data model and the inquiry routing deserve more of the budget than the homepage does.
    Do we need a separate mobile site?
    No, one responsive site built mobile first. What you do need is a real performance budget and testing on a mid range phone over a slow connection, because a large share of your visits happen between appointments rather than at a desk.
    What should the inquiry form ask for?
    County or submarket, asset class, approximate size, target occupancy date, and whether the sender is a principal, a broker or an advisor. Five or six fields. Anything the broker will discover in the first two minutes of a phone call should not be on the form, because every extra field costs you principals.
    Can we publish anything about site conditions or insurance on a listing?
    Name the documents that exist and offer them. Do not summarize them, do not characterize the property, and do not suggest an insurance outcome. General educational content belongs on its own pages, and every such page should tell readers to confirm with the county, a licensed engineer and their own insurer or counsel.

    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 .

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