Marketing for Commercial Real Estate Brokers | Brokers Round Table

In this conversation, we will explore the strategies and techniques behind marketing your services as a commercial real estate broker in the industrial, office, and retail sectors. Chad, Jesse, Adam, and I will discuss how to craft a compelling value proposition, leverage digital marketing tools, and build trust with clients to differentiate ourselves in a competitive market. From attracting new business to nurturing long-term client relationships, this roundtable will provide practical insights into what it takes to stand out and succeed as a commercial real estate broker today.

Key Takeaways:

• Differentiate your marketing by highlighting your proactive tenant outreach and understanding of the right tenant fit for a property, rather than just passively listing spaces.

• Leverage your experience and expertise to provide value to clients - whether it's showing landlords a structured approach to tenant acquisition or demonstrating deep market knowledge when pitching to tenants.

• Utilize digital marketing and online presence to attract clients, but tailor the content to provide value rather than just self-promotion.

• Focus on building long-term client relationships by staying on top of lease expirations and using them as opportunities to secure renewals and extensions.

• Adapt your negotiation tactics and day-to-day activities to the changing market conditions, such as the current tenant-favorable office market.

• In the retail sector, demonstrate your ability to curate the right merchandising mix and tenant lineup to attract clients, while also nurturing relationships with emerging, "cooler" tenants.

Check out CRE Central: www.crecentral.com

About Your Host:

Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate developer and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.

Episode Transcript:

0:00

Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go? Series central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level. Cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor Podcast. Today, we are live with another round of the brokers roundtable here with Jesse fragali and Adam Williams, diving into office and retail chat is now with us today, and we're just going to have to make do without him, but gentlemen, we're going to be diving into marketing your services as a commercial real estate broker. And you know, if, if I know that you guys have done absolutely one thing perfectly, right, your entire careers, it has been on the marketing side. So excited to be diving into this conversation with you all. And Jesse, I'm going to start it off with you, man on the office side. I mean, when it comes to marketing yourself, marketing what you do as a commercial real estate broker, what key elements do you highlight in your marketing materials to really differentiate yourself from other, you know, competitors, when you're pitching these corporate office tenants and landlords?

Speaker 1 1:38

Yeah, so first of all, good to see you guys, I think we Yeah, when we chatted a little bit about this a couple weeks ago, for us, I think what I was I mentioned is that I'm kind of 10 to 11 years into this business. My partner's a few years like, pretty much the same, the same amount. So we are younger guys in the industry, but not so green that we haven't done a couple of these things before. But also, on the other side, we're not old enough that we're just showing up to pitches to win them and then really not doing anything else on the assignment. So all that to say is what we try to really pitch, especially in this market, is actually tenant outreach, finding tenants for listings, not just putting a sign on a building and saying, Hey, this is for lease. You might have been able to get away with that five, six years ago in our market, when two, 3% vacancy was the norm. But I think now, more than ever, you really have to differentiate yourself as to, who are you going to go after? What type of what type of tenants, if you're doing leasing, and then you have to actually give some thought to, you know, the building, the asset type, you know, who is it a fit for? What type of user groups, what industry? So I think that's what we've been doing the last couple years, and we've just had really good reception from landlords taking that approach.

Tyler Cauble 2:57

Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, it's, way too common in this industry to see the brokers that are putting up signs and waiting for the phone to ring. I mean, how are you pitching against that? Because we know that those guys are out there. There's some of the, I mean, honestly, some of the biggest teams in the market, that's what they do. So I mean, can you, can you give us a couple of sentences or just, you know, a couple of lines of like, how you actually use that to your advantage when you're talking to these landlords? Yeah,

Speaker 1 3:23

sure. So what I like the idea of pitching, like to the FOMO, to the if you're missing out, rather than to what we can add. And what I try to say is to them is, how many times have you we just recently in a pitch? How many times you have listing agents that come onto a listing, they're, you know, guns blazing, ready to go. They get this whole plan of how they're going to go attack the market, and then when six months, eight months, and we've seen over the last few years, some listings, even if you're a great broker, they take a lot longer. Now, all of that energy kind of dissipates. And those listing agents that promised you all this stuff are suddenly, you know, not, that energy isn't there. And what we try to say is that we show them a path specifically, of how we which tools we use to outreach through email. What happens if six months later, three months later, they don't reply? Show them how our CRM and we've talked about this on the show different CRMs, how we stay on top of them. And I try to pitch against that aspect. And then again, back to kind of my original point is I talked about the fact that when we go into a room, you know, this is the listening team. You know, it's not like we're going to come in, you're going to get a bunch of junior people on this listing now, like we're the people in the room. Are the are going to be the people that are working for you and I, we try to hammer that home against people that maybe, you know, are doing the opposite? Yeah, that's

Tyler Cauble 4:42

a great way to do it. Whether you're, you're the first to pitch or the last to pitch. It's, it's a it's either a great way to start it off or a great way to end it right, because it's what they're going to be thinking about either the whole time, or it's going to change their perspective there at the very end, Adam, when it comes to, when it comes to retail. I mean, how? How are you communicating to tenants, to landlords, your expertise, your your badassery, one might say, in in retail property. I mean, I guess especially when you're trying to attract clients in in the retail sector, which is evolving rapidly.

Speaker 2 5:16

So I'll break it I'll break it down. Let's start with the landlord side. Because obviously we do, we do a good amount of both. But let's start with the landlord. You know, I never go into a pitch, kind of flat footed, and, you know, I usually try to show up like, let's say that I'm pitching 20,000 square foot of business, bottom of a skyscraper, bottom of a multifamily building, big warehouse conversion. Those are, there's a lot of kind of what we do, old strip center that happens to be well located, that somebody wants to come in and kind of flip the script. I come in with a with a fully baked merchandising mix, right? And a lot of times I'm able to come in with people that are already in kind of our tenant trust tree that we I don't want to say we control the tenants, because that's very grandiose and makes me sound a lot more cool and powerful and badasserous than I actually am. But, but I like to come in there with like, hey, if this is my money, you know, best case scenario, I do own a piece of it, or they'll let me, they'll let me co invest, or they'll let me kind of keep fees and deals, etc. We love doing that in the urban core, where we where we really kind of shine, but we like to come in and say, like, if this was our money, I think, like an owner, I own a bunch of stuff. I've developed stuff. I know how much it costs. I know how risky all this shit is. This is what I would do. This is the merchandising mix that I would use. These are the tenants that I know are in the market, or you are at least surfing the market. I've got a good buddy in Nashville named Tyler. He just turned me on to this group in Nashville. They're going to be touring in two months. Yada yada yada. I like to come in with a full plan. And I also looks like I lost you guys for a second. No, no, you're there. Yeah, we can hear you. The other thing that I like to do is ask questions that to a landlord that show either, oh, shit, I hadn't thought about that yet. Oh shit, my architect didn't tell me that. Why did they not tell me that? Or, you know what I have thought about that? Good question. This is what we're doing to mitigate that risk, right? So I always like to show kind of that like, like, second layer question that's like, Hey, this is how I would think about it if I owned it. This is what I would be worried about if I owned it. So there's not, to your point on brokers that put up signs. There's a tremendous amount of of talented, smart brokers in Charlotte, North Carolina. We're now the, you know, top 20 MSA in the country, right? We like, there's some, there's some people that are that are really smart in this market now. But the list gets a lot shorter when you talk about people that own, invest, develop, oh, and also, are just as tight end as any other broker in town. So I just like to show that kind of second level knowledge, passion, caring that maybe some other people don't do on the tenant side, you know, it's it's similar, like, I'm able to ask a very, very pointed questions that are very pertinent to a tenant's business, because I've owned and operated invested In this stuff before. So the combination of asking really sophisticated questions that kind of get into a tenant's head, and then I had the liberty to kind of drop names of a lot of the deals that we've done over the last freaking I'm getting old man last 1520 years. That just gives a really good comfort level to our ability to kind of not be in over our head. The one, the one thing that you, you have to kind of guard against when you, when you kind of go over the top in meetings like this is to justice point like, are you going to be the dude that works on this, right? Are you just going to be Team Me, right when you show up? So that that's the that's the one kind of caveat to that style is you've got to be ready to answer that, and you've got to be truthful to the way you answer it. Do you have the bandwidth to do this?

Tyler Cauble 9:30

Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, think through what your unique value proposition is that sets you apart from every other commercial real estate broker in the market. I mean, you know, like Adam said, is it the fact that you know you you actually understand the design elements that are going to matter in these deals? Because if you're, if you're the retail sector, there's a lot of multifamily and office guys that are having to do retail because it's required by local codes, they don't understand it, which means that they're kind of coming in and they're just throwing it in. I mean, there's a great example. Here in Nashville, a hotel in Midtown that designed the parking garage to be in the back of the building in the entrance to the restaurant to be around the front. And you basically have to go out the back of the parking garage, down the stairs, around the sidewalk half a block to get to the front entrance of the restaurant. Well, guess what? That restaurant does not do very well.

Unknown Speaker 10:23

Perfect, yeah, just how I would have drawn it up. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 10:26

exactly, exactly. So, yeah, what's, what's your unique value prop also, I mean, utilizing digital marketing and your online presence can be something that, again, is another blue ocean for commercial real estate brokers out there. I don't see a lot of people in the commercial real estate industry doing this. We see it all the time in residential if you guys ever want to learn more about marketing, go study the residential real estate market, because those agencies are better at it than you. They're better at it than us. That's just how it is. It's a much more competitive market. Jesse, actually, the first time I ever saw you, well before we met, was on the BiggerPockets YouTube channel. You've done some commercial real estate videos for them. I'm sure those still do very well for you. I mean, how are you leveraging your online presence in order to attract more clients?

Speaker 1 11:14

Yeah, so it's probably, I mean, it's definitely evolved since then. I think if you're younger and you're in your you have the opportunity to get out and make content. You know, I was fortunate with them because they had such a big following. But in terms of the way I usually utilize it now is, I think it's a little bit more specific. Well, the podcast is great, but also the guests that I have on are, like adjacent real estate professionals, 100% but you, you guys, know, after doing this for so long, it just kind of gets boring, just just interviewing people in the real estate world. So having people that are potentially in your pool of clients in the industry, you know, talking with people in the tech world, talking with people on the economic side of things, it can be beneficial for you, just from a learning standpoint, but also expose you to just different, different individuals. So that's, that's one of the ways what we do now is like, we're not shy about putting it in with pitches now, like, listen, we think, and we will say, we know this is a differentiator. We do this from a social media perspective. We know a lot of brokers don't, and to your point, a lot of commercial brokers, though, and residential agents. They're always, you know, the good ones, the top 5% of them, they're always ahead of the curve when it comes to digital. And somebody was asking me why that is, and, you know, I don't have a good answer to that. All I know is that they, they have the ability to be very flexible and not part of a huge ship. So when you're with CBRE, or, you know, Avison young, making decisions on the fly of different tech to use is one of my working theories as to why a lot of these residential agents like that, they can be very flexible and and look at different technology. And I think the eyeballs are different, right? The individuals are on Instagram or on Tiktok, whereas, you know, corporate CFOs, you know, it's, it's a certain way of thinking that we're only going to email call them, or, you know, maybe have some other ad revenue, or, sorry, ad space that's not really in the kind of hip areas that residential is. But yeah, I think it's a matter of getting out. And if anybody has a question of, like, where do you start? You can reach out to any of these individuals that you want to talk to. A lot of these, a lot of people will speak to you and want to talk about what they do. So I think online you can, that's the nice thing. You can reach out to anybody and play the numbers game. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 13:41

I like that. Adam, you've gone through a recent brand change here, which which includes your digital footprint, right? I mean, it's been really awesome to see how you guys have pivoted. I mean, talk to us about utilizing your online presence to market towards you know, local retailers, regional retailers, national retailers, and maybe you know what, break down the brand kind of tell us the story behind it and why y'all decided to redo that. Because I think that's a pretty interesting

Speaker 2 14:10

play. That's a great question, and great opportunity to plug myself shamelessly. So thank you. So a couple things. The reason we did the brand. I've been a part of a real estate company for 20 years called Legacy. Real Estate advisors, still an owner, still on the executive committee, lovely organization. We own property with these guys, great guys. But legacy became everything to everybody, right? Like, we've got office guys, we've got investment sales guys, we've got land guys, we've got industrial guys, we've got we've got something that that can kind of go in a lot of different directions. And to Jesse's point, the the ability to be very to pivot, and you. To be able to turn on a dime is pretty important, but even more so in the retail world, you need the ability to tell a story. You need and your brand needs to be a story. Because if somebody wants you to kind of take the reins of their retail flagship, you're going to have to be able to tell their story, right? So why would they trust you to really get the heart and soul of this development out to the street and get all these freaking super cool kids to sign up for for leases if you can't tell your own story? So that that's why my partner, James, Craig and I and Kate Yates from my team and Kimberly noble for my team, came together to build this new concept called Rebel. Rebel, which is a highly curated, highly stylized, frankly polarizing, urban retail brand. And we did that because we want to be able to, you know, do what we say we're going to do. We want to be able to walk the walk and tell a badass story, to prove that we can tell your badass story. And the way that I've always looked at branding myself is to give a lot more than I take, right? Like I want a slow drip of content that is not just like a picture of me, you know, on a jet or flashing money or some dumb shit like that, right? It's

Tyler Cauble 16:26

like, Greg CARDONE way,

Speaker 2 16:27

yeah, yeah, I'm not 10x bro and, no, no, I'm not doing that. But it's like, Hey, this is, this is the grand opening of this awesome concept that we were so lucky to be a partner, right? Like, that's, that's the whole point of this shit is to get to grand opening, right? So, so we like this, like, slow drip of kind of inspiring content, if you're in the brand and design world, right? Like, we just started a new piece of content called the rebel reader, where once a month we're sending out this, this very stylized, you know, newsletter for back, lack of a better word, but the main part of of every rebel reader that we, that we do, is brands we love, right? So like it that the brands are on the the forefront and we're not selling you anything, right? It's like, hey, oh, by the way, if you scroll the way down, you might see a couple of deals that we've done, but it's really more about telling a brand story for people that that that kind of tickle our fancy, so that that's always been the way I look at branding is like, how do you reflect your clients into the spotlight, right? That that's, that's that's kind of how I always look at

Tyler Cauble 17:41

it. Yeah, that's right. We've talked about that on this podcast before, but you know your Yoda, they are, you know, Anakin Skywalker or Luke Skywalker, right? Depending on which, which episode you want to watch, but you are the one leading them through the journey. You're not the main character, right? And that's what you really want to do, is make them look like the main character, Jesse. I mean, you've done a phenomenal job over the years of building long term client relationships. It's incredibly important to play the long term game in commercial real estate, because when you're first getting started, you don't necessarily think about like, oh, in five years that lease comes due, right? That tenants gonna have to move. But like, if you do, keep that in mind, the longer you're in the game, the more renewals you get, the more relationships you get, the less you actually have to go out and find new clients. So like, walk us through, what strategies do you use to foster these long term relationships? How do you make sure that these clients are always coming back to you in 357, 10 years down the road, whenever they're ready for the

Speaker 1 18:48

next deal. Yeah, it's a it's a good point. It's like that Survivorship Bias starts kicking in as as they start reaching out to you. I mean, I, I look at this question as like, two separate, two separate clients. There's the listing, you know, landlord clients, and then the tenant clients. Landlord clients are are a little bit easier in a sense of like they, you know, they're always going to be the major landlords in your market are always going to be there. Now, the people, the relationships you have, those people, will move to different, different companies, and that's why it's always great to keep in contact with the people that you have the relationship with, because when they move to another, usually another landlord, there's potential opportunity there. The tenant side is a little bit more elusive. So to more, more to what you're describing when you're earlier your career, somebody says that we don't renew till 2028 if I hear that today, you know you're looking your chops where you hear that when you first start. That seems like it's so far out, but I think number one, you have to as quickly as possible realize that that's that your your clearest path to making money in the industry is being able to line those up and and and working those into your system. Um. Them well. And I think that second piece systems that takes a while, at least for me to actually figure out which software you want to use to actually create the system, and number one or number one and number two actually being on top of it. So I think table stakes today is, you know, if you have a client that you know, say you did a deal with them, you're fortunate enough to represent them. You know they're expiry. You have to have something reminding you when they're coming up, what their window is, because a lot of times it'll be a year, year and a half prior to expiry, that you connect with them, and then, like the bonus one here is, as you get better and learn more in our industry, you start using times like this as an opportunity. So you know, we are at over 20% availability rates in Toronto, 15% vacancy rate. So now is a time where it's a tenant's market, where you might have a client that's two three years out, where five years ago, you would never be able to talk to the landlord. Now, but now you can talk to landlord and say, Listen, how bad do you want to keep this tenant? They're a great tenant. What are the chances you could do something like a blind and extend and, you know, do the deal now and guaranteed them five, seven years of more term at a preferential rate, but also the landlord's willing to do it because they want to keep the tenant. So those are, like, the last one is kind of the out of box stuff that it just, it takes time you got to learn the industry to have those different unique solutions. But being on top of the expirys, I think, is number one.

Tyler Cauble 21:30

Yeah, Jesse, this is a kind of a tangent question. But, you know, with your, your being in the office space, office sector, you know, I'm curious to see, like, how have your negotiation tactics changed in the past few years? Because the office market has changed drastically. And like you just mentioned, like, I think what you just said is kind of what sparked this is, like, that's really interesting. I wouldn't have thought about, you know, tenants starting to renew two to three years early, because it's actually advantageous for them to go ahead and do. So, what else are you kind of working on today? And how has the day to day just kind of changed, you know, post pandemic?

Speaker 1 22:09

Yeah, so the day to day is, I mean, I guess that component of it is a little bit somewhat similar, like we're still, you know, calling doing business development. But what we what we say to potential, like prospects, potential clients, is, I tell younger guys, you have now such a great opportunity to say, this is the tenants market. It has not been this way for a long time. So even if they're if they have an understanding of what square footage they need doing longer deals where they're locking in at today's rate, like I said before, that's one, one advantageous thing. Another one I say is, you know, when people like, yeah, no, we're good, we're good. I'm like, Okay, well, you know, I'll hang up the call just, just, if I could ask you one more question, how's, how's everything with the current landmark, any, any challenges? And usually you'll get Yeah, this, this, and now's the time to ask for solutions to those challenges, and, you know, put that at the forefront, with respect to the early renewals. That's something that I've done over the last few years, that some landlords, depending on how much vacancy they have in their portfolios, yeah, you know, might make the argument that it's not as advantageous, but some of them just want to take a lease and just put it, you know, five, seven years, maybe we took a little bit of a hit on the net rents, but, you know, we got the tenants secured, and we're starting to see a lot more of that. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 23:29

that's right, kick the can down the road, because, I mean, most of these landlords right now just want to survive their next, you know, debt issue, right, as long as they can get past that they can refinance. Yeah, stay alive. You know, it's funny. I haven't really heard that phrase, like all year. That was a big thing for the longest

Speaker 2 23:52

time. Yeah, with my CBD office friends. Oh, that's

Tyler Cauble 23:57

funny. Well, Adam, back to you on the retail side. I mean, look, not all of us can hire a younger, handsomer version of ourselves to stay cool and stay ahead of the trip. So

Speaker 2 24:07

I know that you've met him, so that really hurts coming from you.

Tyler Cauble 24:13

Dude, James is pretty cool. He's got to be a great partner to have. So I mean, how like aside from that, aside from finding a James, how do you stay connected with your clients? Like, how do you make sure that you stay ahead of the trends? Because that's, I mean, you guys have done a phenomenal job of doing that pretty much at every step of the way as the Charlotte market has evolved.

Speaker 2 24:34

Yeah, the biggest thing I'm so lucky because I am, like, really passionate about what what we do, it'd be a lot harder if you know, like Office and industrial. It's just not something I know about and I'm passionate about, like retail. I happen to really have a high level of passion for the restaurant retail world, so it makes it a little easier, but connecting with. Not just James, who's my younger partner. He is 10 years younger than me. He's cooler, you know, he doesn't wear socks and his pants are rolled up to his calves and shit, all the, all the, all the cool stuff, and, you know? And he is, he is younger. He is dialed in. But a lot of it is just like that passion making me go out and take a meeting with an ice cream guy that's only 700 square feet that I'm gonna make no freaking money on, right? But he's part of that new guard, right? And and I spent time with him yesterday, saying, Listen, man, I gotta be honest with you, you're not my my typical client, but I like you. I like what you're trying to do. I like your passion. And it goes back to what I said earlier about being able to show up with that merchandising mix, right? It comes back to keeping your finger on the pulse of the next wave, not just going after the Jenny's ice cream and the Patagonia and those guys that everybody's already heard of that are really, really hard to get, you know, keeping that kind of next wave of tenants in your back pocket that are the ones coming up that aren't getting the return phone phone calls from the big landlords, and kind of shepherding them through the process. And you do right by a couple guys like that, they're going to introduce you to all of kind of the younger, hipper, cooler generation. So it just comes back to trying to add value, even if there's nothing in it for you, even if it's pain in the ass, even if you're busy. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 26:35

I think there's so much to be said with that. I mean, and Jesse, you'll relate to this too. I mean, I had a buddy here in Nashville office. Broker started off in tenant rep, and he had a little, you know, 500 or 1000 square foot tenant. That was one of his first assignments that nobody else in the office would touch. It was way too small. He did the lease well. That company ended up closing a series a raising a ton of money, and within two or three years, he was doing a 10,000 square foot class, a lease for them downtown. I mean, just absolutely crushing it. Talk about playing the long term game. Yeah, he earned it. Earned it. You know, sometimes

Speaker 1 27:12

it's why, it's why women date the starving artists, right? Like we, we want that client 510, years from now, the

Tyler Cauble 27:21

Hail Mary baby. That's what it's all about. Well, awesome. Well, guys, this is a great discussion. Jesse Adam, thank you guys for joining me. If you're if you're watching on Twitter, there's a whole bunch of people on Twitter right now tweet at us. Let us know what your like favorite marketing technique that you have seen in the commercial real estate industry. I want to know what it is. Don't forget to like and subscribe. We'll see you guys in the next one. Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go. Siri central offers a comprehensive application and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level. Siri Central has the resources you need. Visit www.crecentral.com to learn more you.