Traditionally, the commercial real estate industry has been notoriously old-fashioned when it comes to promoting new projects and properties. To many developers, marketing simply means hosting luncheons with raffles, placing image print ads and calling major leasing brokers on the phone. Mailing lists – if they’re used at all – aren’t rented for targeted campaigns or analysis but rather saturation mailings and public relations blasts.
With a new Web site, Tower Cos. is rebuilding that image. Tower created an online presence (www.towerbuilding.com) to communicate with brokers, attract tenants and lease space for a $50 million project called the Tower Building in Rockville, MD. Construction of the 246,000 square-foot, 10-story office building began last October.
The Tower Building is speculative, which means construction was started before the space was leased. It is competing with 20 other new office buildings under construction nearby, including 11 other speculative projects – which aren’t fully leased yet either.
Tower typically spends about $1 per square foot to market a new project.
The Web site – designed by Direct Affect Ltd., Reston, VA – and e-mail don’t significantly add to those marketing costs, says Jeffrey Abramson, a partner with North Bethesda, MD-based Tower Cos.
“With a Web site, there’s an opportunity to market to the world the uniqueness of a building and create an exciting and entertaining virtual tour of the building,” says Abramson. “And you can’t do that with paper.”
Direct mail, e-mail, trade press advertising and banner ads in online real estate newsletters are used to generate traffic for the site. Abramson says Tower stays away from one of the most popular forms of commercial real estate promotion, the “tombstone” ad, which consists of lines of text stacked vertically between white space, usually without pictures or fancy graphics.
“We never use tombstones because everyone else does it,” he says.
Instead, to communicate faster and easier with brokers on an ongoing basis, Tower is concentrating on using the site, which it began heavily promoting in December 1999, six months after its debut. The Web site will be updated this month to keep brokers informed on construction progress, and soon leasing status will be posted as well.
Towerbuilding.com may be the first Web site for an office building under construction. Similar sites for marketing single family housing and apartment rentals have been established over the past few years, but, says Abramson, “I think it’s very unique to use the Web for leasing commercial real estate.”
Brokers can access the site and download information about the building as they please. Prospective tenants as well as brokers can take virtual tours online to see what the building will look like when finished.
“Any brochures or mailers that we use can now be put on the site. But it won’t replace getting on the telephone, meeting with people or finding tenants through word of mouth,” notes Abramson.
Every two weeks, Tower sends about 1,000 e-mails to tenant brokers and landlord brokers in the metropolitan Washington, DC, area. Tower recently started using banner advertising in online real estate newsletters. And, of course, the Tower Building is promoted online in multiple listing services that brokers use.
The site generates about 400 online hits per week, says Abramson, noting little analysis – other than how prospects entered and what pages they viewed – is done of those visits at this time.
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