Author: Sergi

As the global pandemic continues to drive astonishing advances in digital life, the commercial real estate industry is adapting rapidly with exciting innovations.

Now more than ever, building owners and property managers are discovering that engaging, informative, and accessible property management websites can deliver a wide range of advantages in today’s marketplace.

Along with most other aspects of their businesses, prospective and current tenants today expect to be able to accomplish a variety of tasks 24/7 with a click or tap of a screen.

Why do you need a property management website?

Beyond simply existing as digital signage or self-service portals, a well-developed property management website helps property owners and managers streamline services and communications by providing an intuitive information hub that empowers prospects and tenants to easily access everything they need.

Here are 10 reasons why a property management website can help enhance the prospective and current tenant experience from end-to-end.

1. Make your property easy to find with a comprehensive digital identity

As with any business, you need a professional and inviting digital presence for your properties.

Ensuring that every key detail about your property can be found quickly and accurately will benefit prospective tenants, current tenants, employees, visitors, customers, management, and more. That’s why the front-facing website needs to be optimized, user-friendly, and searchable online.

Additionally, an effective property management website combines the required front-facing, public elements with user-restricted portals in a seamless manner.

You will want to choose a property website template that facilitates integration with other dedicated solutions to ease interactions between building owners, property managers, and commercial tenants.

2. Create a centralized client-facing layer for your tenants

Organization is king when it comes to creating a successful property management website. You want a solution that offers one clear, accessible, and centralized digital home for your property. Then on this foundation, you can integrate third-party tools to streamline the workflow for property management teams while enhancing the overall experience for your current and prospective tenants. You can integrate with tools such as:

• Work order requests
• Scheduling & calendars
• Building communications

A thoughtfully designed property website is the gateway to every tool, service, and type of information they might need.

3. Effectively highlight amenities and key property information

Key property information should be prioritized and displayed front and center for all visitors. Presenting these details in a strategic flow will offer the best user experience.

For general visitors, start with an overview of the property and neighborhood, as well as size, class, type, and design style.

Those with specific interests can then discover clearly laid-out sections listing certifications, rankings, awards, and other facts or highlights like size breakdown, year built, and special design or technology features. Additionally, your property website is also an opportunity to highlight the location and most attractive features of the area. One engaging way of doing this is to add an interactive map of useful amenities nearby.

4. Improve visibility of services and building details

Your property management website should offer an easily accessible section that summarizes the most pertinent information from your Tenant Handbook for prospective and current tenants, employees, vendors, and visitors. You can include the most commonly requested details, such as:

• General info about key card access and hours
• Cleaning services
• Parking hours, types, and locations
• Security locations and hours
• Construction services
• Key and card access details (including the number issued per unit, washrooms, additional purchase)
• Signage descriptions and location details
• Holiday closures
• Mail delivery service and schedule, as well as pick-up and express carrier info
• Maintenance requests with link to tenant portal
• Property management contact info

5. Market available spaces in a compelling fashion

Your property website is an invaluable opportunity to make the best virtual impression, which is increasingly important these days, and helps bring your vacant spaces to life in an engaging and appealing way. Ensure your site includes beautiful photos, interactive virtual tours, and easy-to-access details about available units with downloadable floor plans (PDFs).

6. Create a sense of connection and community

In the brave new world of living virtually and working remotely, a sense of belonging to a community is more important than ever.

Choose a property management website template that can easily integrate tools like tenant experience apps or tenant portals that facilitate connections between tenants, including message boards, interactive directories, instant messaging, and more.

These services help build a digital community that tenants can interact with every day, at any time, at their own pace and convenience, to foster feelings of connectivity and satisfaction.

7. Easily share your Tenant Handbook

Along with encouraging communication between tenants, a property management website can provide ways to boost communication between tenants and management.

A document portal can help streamline paperwork and offer easy access to key materials such as a Tenant Handbook.

To proactively keep tenants informed and engaged, it is particularly beneficial to have a shared secure area for tenants to access documents like a Tenant Handbook detailing the building rules and regulations or other community-related documents, like an events schedule, restaurant menus, and more.

8. Adapt to the changing needs of the building

One of the greatest advantages of working in the digital space is how fluid, adaptable, and flexible it can be to varied and changing objectives.

Ensure that your property management website template is customizable so that you can tailor it to the needs of the building lifecycle — whether needed for leasing/marketing or optimized for tenant communications.

This will allow you to take a holistic approach in considering the distinct desires and interests of website visitors and property managers.

Prospective tenants and current tenants will want to frequent different areas of the site more often than others. Property managers want helpful tenant information to be highly accessible to ease their administrative burden. Marketing and leasing teams want to be able to quickly showcase the latest openings and availabilities in the most attractive way possible.

9. Gather invaluable data

Running smoothly behind the scenes, data-gathering tools can allow you to collect and present detailed insights on website traffic and sources, visitor behavior and interests, tenant satisfaction and pain points, and energy usage trends.

You can then draw upon these insights for future improvements to monetize and market your building for greater revenue and retention. A customizable property site can also complement other third-party tools for backend management like lease creation, payment terms modeling and processing, maintenance request processing, and other accounting activities.

10. Reduce administrative workload

Comprehensively presenting your property online works for you 24/7 by proactively answering questions, avoiding confusion, attracting interest, and reducing the administrative workload for marketing, leasing, and management teams, allowing them to prioritize key interactions.

All-in-one technology platforms like SharpLaunch deliver a dedicated digital space where all of these critical elements can be hosted in a user-friendly way. Pertinent details and other property management platforms and internal transaction systems can all be integrated in a centralized, interconnected online hub that represents that particular property in the best, most-professional light.

Whether you’re a property owner or broker, having an established, professional online presence to engage with prospects and successfully conduct business is no longer an option. It’s a necessity if you want to remain relevant and navigate the difficulties presented in today’s environment.

Studies say that more than 85% of users begin their property searches online. Plus, once they find your site, 75% of people say they judge a company’s credibility based on the design of its website.

That means that in order to effectively market assets and stand out from the competition, it’s vital to establish a marketing foundation that extends beyond mere flyers, brochures, and LoopNet listings.

​​To effectively market assets and stand out from the competition, it’s vital to establish a marketing foundation that extends beyond mere flyers, brochures, and LoopNet listings.

A professional property website gives you the foundation you need to expand your digital footprint and engage both potential and existing tenants.

Let’s have a look at the 6 reasons why you need a website not only for your CRE firm, but also for every property listing.

1. Make a Powerful First Impression

In the fast-moving CRE industry, your prospects expect your property to have a high-quality, authoritative web presence.

A well-designed, interactive property website in line with your corporate branding is essential to establishing trust and credibility while maintaining consistency across your portfolio, thus making a great first impression among valued prospects.

33 Arch Street by CBRE New England

A full-feature commercial real estate marketing software can help automate and scale the creation of listing websites and keep the information online up-to-date by feeding data to other listing portals and social media channels.

2. Keep Property Information Up to Date

Among the most frustrating challenges for prospects scouring the web for available listings is the headache of sifting through old, outdated property information on commercial real estate listing sites and social media channels.

It is possible they do not reflect the property as it currently stands nor provide accurate, up-to-date contact information for the brokers and property managers overseeing the asset.

Having a dedicated commercial real estate landing page for your listing allows you to always maintain up-to-date property information and complete control over what is published online. Your building information, availabilities, price and contact information can be updated in minutes.

You are also making sure your prospects are focused on your listing alone and not distracted by other listings typically presented on CRE listing sites.

As a property owner or property manager you can create an property management website to help your existing tenants access building information, tenant manuals, rules and regulations or emergency procedures.

3. Feature the Most Critical Elements That Buyers Want

Your website is the ultimate showroom to display all relevant creative assets you’ve created for your properties and you can put your valuable content to good use, showing investors and potential tenants everything they need from anywhere in the world—and from the comfort of their desk or mobile phone.

By creating a dedicated property website for each listing you can accentuate key property features you wish to highlight to a prospective buyer or tenant.

According to our recent analysis we saw that the majority of visitors scroll directly to the photo gallery, building information and floor plans sections.

Brokerages and owners can focus on a few key elements that will capture the attention of interested tenants and present their properties in the best light by doing the following:

• Play up your assets’ most valuable amenities and highlight the key characteristics of each opportunity with your images and descriptions.
• Provide 3D virtual tours to give prospects an immersive digital experience of the property to generate interest before having to schedule an onsite tour.
• Supply updated information on current availabilities and include detailed floor plans that are easy to download.
• Display awards and certifications that provide instant recognition for your building, enhances your brand, and differentiates your property.
• Highlight surrounding amenities and other points of interests such as local businesses and corporate neighbors.
• Add contact information for property management and service teams.

4. Provide Direct Access to Key Documents

Your property website never sleeps. In the current climate, it’s important to be accessible anytime day or night, 24/7 and with a platform that can provide access to key marketing and sales documents to make sure you’re capturing interest and not losing opportunities.

By including an area on your property website where prospects can sign up to access documents you’re not only providing a streamlined communication and document sharing process, but also enabling a quick way to identify and qualify leads.

Imagine saving hours of time spent on sending PDF attachments back and forth and instead sharing one unique URL where all this information lives and track exactly who accessed it and at what time.

5. Track The Most Important KPIs

Do you have insights into your website analytics? Do you know where your visitors come from? If you don’t have relevant data to measure your listing presentation’s performance, you can’t learn what works and what doesn’t.

Traditional methods to attract tenants and investors can be difficult to measure and determine the ROI. Printed flyers? Direct mail? A conversation over a networking lunch? Signage? Local sponsorships? It’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of the typical methods to get the word out, but your property website is different.

A property website, outfitted with analytics software, can track your traffic and visitor engagement and tell you which websites and campaigns drive the most traffic to your website without you having to lift a finger.

With more advanced tools, you can do some pretty amazing things, like learn what people are most likely to click or how much time they spend on specific areas of your website. This data becomes actionable, and helps you make future marketing investments based on what works.

6. Promote Across Multiple Channels

Expanding your digital footprint can help you reach a much larger number of potential investors or tenants than with traditional tactics. So, defining an effective commercial real estate marketing strategy to promote your listings depends largely on having the foundation that all your efforts will link to.

Your property website can be connected to traditional property portals like LoopNet and CoStar to make sure all the information and contact people are up-to-date.

In addition, in can serve as a centralized digital hub for your marketing and advertising campaigns on:

• Social media networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
• Email marketing campaigns
• Google Ad campaigns
• PR and news coverage
• Press releases or announcements

 

It’s no secret that staying well informed about commercial real estate industry news will help you keep up with key trends, spot new opportunities, and proactively identify potential pitfalls. Additionally, your thought-leadership pieces and targeted advertising will bring in more for your investment when placed in the right context and in front of the right readers.

However, it can be difficult these days to find the time to research the best sources, analyze their marketing potential, and process all the information to act as quickly as needed.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the top commercial real estate news sites that offer valuable insights and unique opportunities for your content marketing and advertising efforts:

Bisnow

Bisnow is a multi-platform digital media company that produces news and live events. Founded in 2005, Bisnow Media is owned by private equity firm Wicks Group and has offices in New York and Washington, D.C.

Covering 27 metropolitan markets across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. with a subscriber base of over 600,000, Bisnow is one of the largest producers of commercial real estate news and events.

Bisnow produces industry-specific e-newsletters highlighting news and information primarily for commercial real estate professionals. The company distributes its e-newsletters to over 600,000 subscribers.[4] The company also produces business-related events which have also featured experts on topics such as the arts, philanthropy, relationships, technology, and futurism.

More information on Bisnow website.

Connect Media

Connect Media is a commercial real estate news, events and creative solutions company with offices in Los Angeles and New York and team members nationally.

The firm was founded in 2014, and its news division has grown to encompass eleven daily newsletters, and 10 CRE product sector newsletters produced by a team of veteran editors. Connect annually produces and markets more than 200 digital events that attract leaders from all aspects of commercial real estate.

Additionally, Connect CREative, the company’s integrated marketing communications agency, produces a host of campaigns and materials for a wide range of clients across the U.S ranging from videos to websites and logos, to content marketing and public relations programs.

More information on Connect Media website.

Bizjournals

The Business Journals is a weekly, business-oriented newspaper and offers business leaders many avenues for making connections and gives them a competitive edge locally, regionally and nationally through print, online and face-to-face events.

The Business Journal’s 40 business newspapers stretch from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and from Austin, Texas, to Albany, N.Y. Bizjournals features local people and decision makers who are leaders in their business communities. They report on local and national issues that impact subscribers’ businesses and assist them in growing their companies.

More information on Bizjournals website.

The Real Deal

The Real Deal is the premier real estate news outlet in the US, reaching millions of professionals daily through digital, print, social media and events. They publish breaking news, market intelligence, custom research, proprietary rankings, deal analysis, profiles, trends and more.

In addition to the monthly New York magazine, The Real Deal now publishes quarterly publications in Los Angeles and Miami. It also publishes special issues once a year for the Hamptons, Long Island, New Jersey, Westchester and Fairfield counties, as well as an annual retail issue distributed each May at ICSC’s Recon, the largest global event for retail real estate.

Quantcast rates us among the 300-most visited sites in the US and ranked us #1 among U.S. websites with the wealthiest audiences

More information on The Real Deal website.

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is a business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. It is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp.

The newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Journal has been printed continuously, since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the largest newspapers in the United States by circulation, with a circulation of about 2.834 million copies (including nearly 1,829,000 digital sales) as of August 2019, compared with USA Today’s 1.7 million.

The Journal publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ, which was originally launched as a quarterly but expanded to 12 issues in 2014. An online version was launched in 1996, which has been accessible only to subscribers since it began.

More information on The Wall Street Journal website.

GlobeSt.com

GlobeSt.com is the leading source of news, analysis and intelligence for the commercial real estate community. Their award-winning website, with more than 500,000 page views monthly is generally considered the go-to site for industry professionals who need to keep up with their market.

GlobeSt.com provides commercial real estate owners, investors, developers, brokers and finance professionals with comprehensive coverage, analysis and best practices necessary to innovate and build their businesses.

More information on GlobeSt.com website.

Commercial Observer

Commercial Observer is the leading platform to connect and inform commercial real estate professionals — including building owners and managers, brokers, commercial lenders and professional services firms.

Their weekly coverage, up-to-the-minute updates on CommercialObserver.com, and live events provide an essential mix of breaking news, interviews, features, exclusive industry columnists, and in-depth analyses of market trends.

More information on Commercial Observer.

As the world pushes further into the digital sphere in response to the global pandemic, many companies are searching for the best commercial real estate advertising strategy to embrace the unprecedented challenges and unexpected opportunities of these uncertain times – and the commercial real estate industry is no exception.

With the volatility in global financial markets putting an edge on even the rosiest of growth outlooks, firms are taking a fresh look at their commercial real estate advertising efforts to ensure they are reaching the right number of the right people at the right time in the most cost-effective way.

Whether you need to maximize your advertising budget or want to better capitalize on the countless interactions happening online these days, you need to know how to choose the best channels for your commercial real estate ads to reach a bigger audience that is also more targeted and engaged.

Now more than ever, being savvier about advertising your commercial real estate offerings can help you take advantage of the different benefits offered by different channels, including:

• Instant access to a large, engaged, and interested audience
• Flexibility and fast results to test different marketing messages and targeting profiles
• Powerful and detailed analytics to track your spend and monitor ROI

So, how do you advertise commercial real estate in an ever-changing world?

Read on to discover the key details you need to know about the top five advertising channels for your commercial listings. You will learn about reasons to choose each option, including their audience profiles, ad formats, and pricing estimates. Additionally, as you plan your next campaign, you can also check out our post with great commercial real estate marketing ideas as inspiration for expanding and enhancing your company’s digital footprint.

 

1. Advertise on Commercial Real Estate Listings Websites

At the top of the list are the commercial real estate websites that allow you to quickly put your premier properties in front of an audience already deep into the research and evaluation process.

Besides the costlier sites like CoStar and LoopNet, there are several good options that offer specific pricing and advertising packages based on your specific needs.

Why Advertise in CRE Listings Sites?

Commercial real estate listings sites are online marketplaces that connect tenants and buyers with properties for lease and sale.

You can aggregate available commercial spaces for sale, lease, sublease or co-working and allow your ideal prospects to search them based on their location, space needs, and amenities.

Who is the Target Audience?

The audience for CRE listing sites are investors, brokers and tenants searching for different types of commercial properties for sale or lease.

Because they are content-rich and updated constantly, they rank well in Google for location and amenity-specific searches, and will be viewed by interested prospects who are early in the buying cycle, as well as those familiar with these sites and performing more targeted searches.

Common Advertising Format

Most CRE listing sites offer a combination of free and paid features depending on their reach and audience. Most free plans are time limited and provide minimal features for describing your properties.

• Subscription plans – These depend on the number of property listings, location, users or number of leads you will receive. Memberships also range from single properties to enterprise plans for brokerage offices with multiple properties and agents.
• Premium listings – The majority listing sites offer the possibility to enhance the visibility of your listings within their search results.

2. Advertise in Trade Journals

Commercial real estate trade journals such as Urban Land Magazine, National Real Estate Investor and Real Estate Forum are commonly read by other CRE professionals and prospective tenants/buyers who are active in the industry. They feature the latest industry insights, market trends, market reports and thought leadership articles that can be highly relevant to your target audience.

Why Advertise in Commercial Real Estate Trade Journals?

Trade journals offer specialized content focus that trade publications have for commercial real estate topics. Advertising in commercial real estate trade journals gives you the chance to reach a highly targeted audience of potential clients and partners and at the same time drive brand awareness for your business.

Who is the Target Audience?

Trade journal audience are commercial real estate professionals interested in reading about industry trends in office, retail, industrial, multi-family space, the impact of economic conditions on the market, and industry leader outlooks from the top experts in the field. They are plugged into the industry unlike anyone else and are a captive audience for the right campaigns.

Common Advertising Formats

There are often multiple different advertising options available depending on the publication, the number of channels they manage, and their circulation numbers. These include:

• Magazine/Journal Advertising – This will depend highly on circulation and placement – it can range from $500 to $10,000.
• Newsletter Advertising – Many of these sites also offer newsletters, in which you can place ads or featured content for between $600-$3,000.
• Website Advertising – Traffic tends to be higher for website advertising and rates fluctuate accordingly, starting at $500 and ranging upwards depending on unique visitors per month.

You can learn more about the biggest trade journals and their advertising options in our in-depth list of commercial real estate trade journals.

3. Advertise on News Sites & Blogs

While many trade journals have a dedicated web presence with significant traffic, they are often formatted and presented differently than traditional commercial real estate blogs and news sites such as The Real Deal, Globest.com or commercial real estate verticals on Inc.com or WSJ.com.

Why Advertise in Commercial Real Estate News Sites & Blogs?

Much like trade journals, these sites are designed to provide thought leadership and industry news to professionals in the commercial real estate industry. They highlight recent news, columns by leading voices in the industry, and frequently searched trends. More importantly, they drive large visitor numbers that you can target through your ads.

Who is the Target Audience?

News sites and blogs tend to have a slightly more diverse audience than trade journals, which are designed for a narrow, but highly targeted audience. As a result, a website like The Real Deal will generate more pageviews and visitors per month but may include people outside dedicated developers and commercial real estate professionals. Your audience likely includes private investors, tenants, researchers, and those staying up to date on the market in general. The breakdown tends to lean towards CXX and ownership, as well as EVP, SVP, and acquisitions focused individuals with a smaller contingent of finance professionals, brokers, and lawyers.

Common Advertising Formats

Advertising on a news site or blog is available in several forms, including:

• Banner Ads – These are placed throughout the site, above the fold, in the sidebar, or alongside specific posts. The placement and size of the ad will determine the cost, which is then scaled against the number of impressions expected in the period during which you advertise.
• Email Newsletter – Most news and blogs sites will maintain a sizable email distribution list and offer sponsored content opportunities to that list. Rates will depend on the size and quality of the list.
• Sponsored Content – Many but not all news and blog sites offer sponsored content opportunities. Thought leadership alongside your company’s name that highlights an area that is particularly impactful to your target audience.

4. Advertise with Google AdWords

The world’s largest advertising network is tempting for any business attempting to generate leads online. Google owns more than 75% of the search market share in North America and has the world’s largest online display advertising network, reaching more than 80% of global Internet users, so investing in AdWords is attractive, but is it a good fit for your commercial real estate business?

Why Advertise on Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is the advertising platform that runs alongside Google’s search results. It also powers display ads and video advertising on millions of websites and YouTube. Google’s ad network is extensive. It reaches billions of people around the globe, and is ubiquitous on both desktop and mobile devices. Simply put, if you want people to see your advertisements, Google is the best way to do so.

Who is the Target Audience?

Everyone. And while this is mighty tempting, it can also lead to excessive, poorly targeted spend. Google’s text ads work by targeting specific keywords that someone might search for in the search engine, charging for every click on that ad by a user. If you are too broad, it is easy to attract not only the wrong people to your website, but to do so for the wrong searches. Google AdWords can be setup and running in less than 10 minutes, but for proper targeting that doesn’t cost you a fortune, it needs to be finely tuned.

Common Advertising Formats

There are two main types of campaigns on Google AdWords, each with dozens of permutations and options. They include:

• Google Search – The text ads that appear above and below Google’s search results are bid on by advertisers at a per-click rate. The amount you pay will depend on your bid, the competition for that term, and other factors like quality score and how relevant your website is.
• Display Network – Google’s display ads show on millions of websites including specific Google websites like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube. The network also includes mobile sites and apps. You can use text, image, video, or rich media formats and define the types of sites, keyword matches, and traffic demographics you’d like to reach and are similarly charged for each click on these ads.

In terms of pricing, both display network and Google search ads will charge you based on a per-click model. A good average Click Thru Rate is 2.5%, so for every click you pay for, you will receive 40 or more impressions. The cost per click can be as low as $1 for general terms and low competition keywords, and as high as $50+ for highly competitive CRE targets. You should start by researching which real estate keywords are the best to target to ensure better results and a reasonable budget.

5. Run Paid Social Media Campaigns

Social media marketing for commercial real estate is relatively new compared to the other options on this list and can be slightly more difficult because of how many options are at your disposal. Not only are there multiple networks on which you can advertise, but each network offers several forms of advertising you can purchase. So how do you spend wisely and reach the right audience?

Why Advertise on Social Media?

Social media offers a number of advantages over the other sources in this article.

To start, it is ubiquitous in a way that few things are.

More than 133 million people in the US have LinkedIn accounts, and 41% of all high wealth individuals are active on the platform. Facebook reaches 1.4 billion daily active users, 207 million of which are in the US. Most of the people you target are on Facebook or LinkedIn, and the advertising tools here allow you to target them based on a number of criteria.

Who is the Target Audience?

Much like Google AdWords, the answer is nearly everyone. With a majority of adults on Facebook and a majority of professionals using LinkedIn, you can reach a huge swath of your audience with well-targeted ads on either platform.

Unlike AdWords, however, which requires careful selection of keywords for ad targeting, you can show ads on social media based on user-provided demographics and interests. LinkedIn allows targeting by company name, size, and revenue, while Facebook allows targeting by location, age, and specific interests and job titles. This targeting power is important to be successful on either platform.

Common Advertising Formats

Social media advertising can be done in one of several ways, with new options becoming available as new features are rolled out:

• In-Feed Ads – The most common type of ad on social media is a featured or sponsored post. This is content published a company page that is boosted via ads to appear to people outside your network. Because Facebook shows organic content to as few as 10% of your followers and LinkedIn isn’t much better, this is a vital tool to boost the reach of published content.
• Text Ads – LinkedIn allows you to show text ads in the sidebar of content on their platform. These ads are short, much like Google’s text ads, but are targeted based on demographics, rather than search patterns.
• Video Ads – Both Facebook and LinkedIn now support video advertising in some form, with more features rolling out. Video ads are placed in organically posted videos to as well as standalone within user feeds.

Pricing for social media advertising varies dramatically. On Facebook, for example, you can spend between $0.50-$3.00 per click based on the target audience and the engagement rates of your content. On LinkedIn, cost per click is almost always higher, but with a professional network, you are getting a more engaged audience in most cases.

Driving Success with Targeted Commercial Real Estate Advertising

If you are preparing to increase your advertising budget and start generating new leads for your CRE business, one of the first steps is to evaluate the potential return on investment you will see.

Based on your budget, desired reach, and ability to experiment, the five platforms listed in this article will give you the opportunity to test and build an advertising plan that works best for you.

We can safely say that 2020 has been an unprecedented year with the global pandemic taking center stage and affecting all aspects of our professional and personal lives.

How did the commercial real estate technology industry fare? Let’s have a look at the biggest proptech news headlines of 2020.

CRE Startups Have Eased Off The Gas Pedal Despite Record Investment

January 2020

Flickr/Jon Russell

No one is eager to be the next WeWork anymore.

Startups in the real estate industry have spent the months surrounding the collapse of the coworking monster’s valuation adjusting their growth plans to focus on sustainability, rather than grabbing as much market share as possible, The Wall Street Journal reports.

That change in strategy has come even as venture capital investment into real estate startups more than tripled from 2018 to 2019, when CRETech estimates that total equity and debt investment into the arena topped $31B.

Read full article by Matthew Rothstein on Bisnow

ClientLook Acquired By LightBox

January 2020

Joining LightBox will positively impact our ability to support your needs through a new and growing set of capabilities. We expect a very smooth transition without interruption to the ClientLook experience. Serving the commercial real estate professionals who rely on ClientLook every day remains our top priority.

Read the press release on ClientLook.com

Fifth Wall launches $200m carbon fund in ‘pitchfork moment’

January 2020

“This is one of the biggest things to happen to real estate since the invention of the internet.”

That is Brendan Wallace’s reasoning behind the launch this week of Fifth Wall’s $200m (£153m) Carbon Impact Fund.

Speaking to EG, Fifth Wall’s co-founder and managing partner warns that 2020 will be the year everyone realises that, above all else, climate change is “a real estate problem” as he urges the sector to prepare for a “pitchfork moment”.

He adds that as the general public, financial markets and regulators become increasingly focused on climate change, real estate – as the single biggest culprit – no longer has a choice when it comes to addressing its carbon footprint. Those who don’t change will not only be hit with huge financial penalties but will have to face the wrath of the world.

Read the full article by Emily Wright on Estates Gazette

biproxi Acquires Commercial Real Estate Listing Site OfficeSpace.com

February 2020

biproxi Acquires Commercial Real Estate Listing Site OfficeSpace.combiproxi, the leading end-to-end commercial real estate platform trusted by the world’s largest commercial brokerages, today announced that it has acquired OfficeSpace.com.

The acquisition will allow biproxi to consolidate all of its commercial real estate (CRE) data and listings on the OfficeSpace.com website, which is already the second-largest CRE listing site in the U.S. with over 550,000 listings, and is visited by over 350,000 buyers and tenants every month. In addition, OfficeSpace.com has historical data on over 1.7 million listings reaching back over 15 years.

Read the full article on Fintec Buzz

Eden Nabs WeWork’s Managed by Q, JLL Technologies Partnership

March 2020

Image by Shutterstock

Workplace management platform Eden has acquired its competitor Managed by Q from WeWork after a months-long bidding process. The acquisition amount is undisclosed for the investment round that Jones Lang LaSalle Technologies led to cement the acquisition, as it joins the JLLT portfolio in a new partnership.

According to news reports, Eden received a deep discount for Managed by Q, which WeWork paid an estimated $200 million for close to a year ago. Eden will absorb Managed by Q’s workforce, existing clients and vendors. The acquisition means more growth for the firm but doesn’t change anything different from a strategy perspective, J Joe Du Bey, CEO and co-founder of Eden, tells GlobeSt.com. “Eden was already in hyper-growth and the acquisition even accelerates our growth even and makes us a clear category leader for workplace platforms,” Du Bey said. “It will help us to scale throughout the U.S. and internationally this year.”

Read the full article by Mariah Brown on GlobeSt

VC Market Pulse: State of the Market Survey: Pandemic Disrupts Boom in Real Estate Venture Capital

April 2020

Real Estate Tech VCs have a Low & Dejected outlook over the 3-6 months

The real estate tech venture capital market was riding a wave of accelerated growth in the past two years. Record-setting figures in both deal volume and capital had the young industry on track to set new records with impending IPO’s, notable exits and continued capital growth. However, in the wake of the global pandemic and tightening economic conditions, real estate tech startups, and their VC sponsors are entering a period of transformation.

In a recent 2020 CREtech State of the Market survey, a large proportion of real estate tech investors and VC respondents, 56%, have a ‘Low and Dejected’ outlook of the macro real estate tech market in the next 3 to 6 months.

Read the full article on CREtech

Construction tech startup Procore shelves IPO

May 2020

Image by Boardroom Insiders, iStock

The latest coronavirus casualty is construction startup Procore, which has shelved its recent plans for an initial public offering. The news isn’t all bad for the California-based construction management software company. A private funding round has pushed its valuation to $5 billion.

After filing paperwork in February for an IPO, the company completed a private funding round that raised more than $150 million, according to Bloomberg.

Read the full article on The Real Deal

Fifth Wall adds new partner as it seeks at least $200 million for a new climate impact fund

June 2020

When it first launched nearly three years ago, Fifth Wall had a vision of leveraging capital limited partners from across the real estate development and construction business to back the technologies the industry needed most.

That early vision resonated so well that the firm has grown from managing one fund of $212 million to holding roughly $1.2 billion in assets under management. It has also come to the realization that the investment vehicles they’re currently managing have one huge blind spot — climate-related technologies.

With that deficit in mind, the firm has set out to raise a new climate-focused investment vehicle with at least a $200 million target, and has brought on a new partner to help invest that capital.

Read the full article by Jonathan Shieber on Techcrunch

Startups’ Valuations Are Climbing More Slowly Since Covid-19

June 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is still hitting startup valuations hard, but the pain was less acute in April than in March, according to a new report from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West.

About the same number of companies, 64, got venture funding in April compared to an average month in 2019, the report’s authors wrote. But the per-share change in a private company’s stock price rose only 60% with each new funding round. That’s a bit better than in March when share prices went up by only 42%, but far worse than in the average month last year, when startups’ stock prices increased by 93%.

Read full article by Sarah McBride on Bloomberg

CoStar Closes on $190M Ten-X Acquisition

May 2020

Commercial real estate data giant CoStar Group is purchasing Ten-X for $190 million, a move that would increase the publicly-traded CoStar’s presence in the distressed real-estate space.

The all-cash deal for the online real estate transaction platform could be finalized Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Thomas H. Lee Partners, the private equity firm that owns Ten-X Commercial, had previously been in talks with CoStar, but when those talks did not lead to an agreement, Ten-X laid off nearly half its workforce in November, The Real Deal reported.

Read full article by Erin Hudson and Hiten Samtani on The Real Deal

How To Raise $36 Million In The Middle Of A Pandemic

July 2020

I’m a strong believer – as we’ve explored several times over the past few months – that the current COVID-19 pandemic, though devastating for society and the economy, is motivating real estate industry stakeholders to fully embrace proptech and the value it can deliver now and for the future.

It’s not surprising that, in all this doom and gloom, startups providing this value are getting the opportunity to shine. Last week, LA-based proptech startup Openpath (a firm favorite of this column) announced it had just closed a $36 million Series C round led by Greycroft Ventures. I sat down virtually with Openpath co-founders and respectively President and CEO James Segil and Alex Kazerani, as well Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft to discuss how (and why) it all happened.

Read the full article by Angelica Krystle Donati on Forbes

MetaProp seeks $200M to back bigger startups

August 2020

MetaProp, a New York-based venture capital firm, is looking to raise $200 million — its biggest fund yet — to back later-stage proptech startups.

The five-year-old company disclosed the fund, dubbed MetaProp Growth Select I, in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. Co-founder Aaron Block is listed as the fund manager.

Read full article by E.B. Solomont on The Real Deal

RealPage acquires smart apartment startup Stratis IoT

September 2020

Stratis IoT connects smart apartment systems and devices into one app, integrating over 100 of the largest providers of smart apartment devices and systems.

Read full article by Julia Falcon on Housingwire

Camber Creek closes $155M fund

October 2020

Camber Creek — an early backer of proptech startups including VTS and WhyHotel — has raised $155 million from investors for its third and largest fund.

The venture capital firm said the fund was oversubscribed; it set out to raise $120 million last year. Institutional investors including the Texas Employees Retirement System invested in the fund, which is four times the size of Camber Creek’s first two funds combined.

Read full article by E.B. Solomont on The Real Deal

Tishman Speyer creates $300M SPAC for Proptech investments

November 2020

Tishman Speyer, one of the largest commercial real estate landlords in the United States with a 78 million square feet portfolio, recently created a $300 million special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to invest in property technology (Proptech), Commercial Observer reports. The news comes after Tishman Speyer filed paperwork with the SEC on November 9. According to the filing, the SPAC will be focused on, “real estate adjacent businesses and technologies targeting the real estate space.”

This launch will allow Tishman Speyer to use its formidable presence in the real estate industry to operate as a strategic partner with technology companies. Investments will be made through the SPAC, TS Innovation Acquisition Corp.

Read full article by Joe Dyton on Connected RE Mag

Everyone thinks COVID-19 destroyed the office. But that’s not the whole story

December 2020

The office has been a major casualty of the pandemic, with many companies operating remotely and employees working from home. Demand for office space has plummeted since March, with companies big and small pushing back their return to the office, sometimes indefinitely. But according to a new index tracking office demand in seven major U.S. markets, while offices seem to be down, they’re not completely out.

Read full article by Nate Berg on Fast Company

A lead management system or a customer relationship management system (CRM) should make your daily work easier.

It should streamline and remove extra steps that consume time you could use to engage with prospects and grow your business. If your CRM doesn’t do that, or if you are still using Excel to manage leads, consider the benefits of a dedicated lead management system designed for commercial real estate companies.

But how do you ensure you’re getting the most out of your CRM, and that it’s working for you instead of against you?

If you have an expensive CRM, and your team has spent hours migrating contacts and setting up rules, but isn’t following best lead management practices, you’re probably wasting both time and money.

Let’s take a closer look at key best practices to get the most out of your system and how the right software can support your efforts.

Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your Lead Management System

1. Choose the Right Platform that Fits your Needs

There are hundreds of lead management platforms out there, but in the commercial real estate industry, few of them are designed for the specific needs of your business.

When choosing a generic CRM, there are several challenges you’ll need to address:

• They tend to be bloated with features you’ll never use, making them difficult to manage
• User adoption becomes a challenge because of how intricate the interface is
• Customization is often required to meet the very specific nature of your business

Salesforce is a prime example. It’s well known because it’s the world’s largest CRM, but that popularity means it’s designed to fit the needs of everyone. You don’t need a system that fits the needs of everyone. You need one for commercial real estate.

When choosing a platform, ask yourself how much time and resources you have to invest in adoption and implementation. If the answer is “not very much,” consider a more intuitive solution designed specifically for your business. A lead management system for CRE, for example, allows you to assign new contacts to specific properties.

2. Have a Standardized Process

This is a universal problem that plagues almost all types of businesses.

Every salesperson has their own process, which in turn makes reporting, lead management, and data transfer incredibly difficult. A standardized lead management process helps to minimize errors, streamlines operations and builds a foundation on which you can build future sales, marketing, and tenant management processes.

To ensure everyone is on the same page, gather your entire team, and craft a comprehensive process for lead management in your organization. Cover the following areas:

• Define what is a lead – When does a contact enter your system, and once they are in your system, when do you define them as leads? Is it after they have requested certain information? Once a call has been scheduled? Or is every contact in your system a viable lead?
• Qualify your leads – Once someone is considered a lead, what steps do you take to qualify them? What information needs to be included on their contact record and who will do the qualifying?
• Respond to inquiries in a timely manner – If someone has questions that they submit by a form on your website, or they make a phone call, who is responsible for following up and in what time frame?
• Add notes to track communication – Notes should be added whenever a member of your team communicates with a prospect. Whether it’s a phone call that wasn’t answered, or an in-depth email received in response to a query. Association with individual properties should be kept updated at all times as well.
• Move leads into stages to track progress – When a lead progresses in your sales process, update their record to reflect that change. This can be in the form of lifecycle stages, opportunity stages, or just a property added to a contact to show they have progressed.

3. Segment Your Leads

No two leads are the same. Everyone in your sales funnel is at a different stage, with different needs and different follow-up requirements. This is a good thing. This means you can create segmentation in your lead management process that helps to streamline a lot of the things you do every day.

For example, you can organize your leads by:

• Pipeline stages – Is a meeting scheduled? Has the meeting happened? Have they viewed certain documents or voiced interest beyond an initial call? Create stages to reflect these steps and update accordingly.
• Tags – Use tags to identify leads by various properties, such as location, interest, specific properties, or demographics.
• Activity filters – Filter activity levels to prioritize those leads that are more actively engaging with your website and marketing and sales efforts.

The benefit of a CRM is that, no matter how intricately you want to segment and communicate with your leads, the tools are there to do so.

4. Keep Your Data Clean

One of the quickest ways to undermine your lead management processes is to ignore your data for too long.

Messy data with outdated records, inaccurate assignments, and missing information can make everything else you do less effective and more time-consuming. Create recurring tasks for each of the following:

• Clean Up Bounced and Unsubscribed Emails – Check all bounced emails to see if someone has changed companies or otherwise. Remove any emails you cannot update in the system or that have proactively unsubscribed from communications.
• Update Contact Records – Regularly audit your contact records for accuracy. Check that there are no missing properties and that all contact information is up to date.
• Check for Inactive Contact Owners – Make sure all contacts in your system are assigned to someone. If someone leaves your organization, these orphaned leads can get forgotten.
• Build a Data Plan within Your Organization – Clearly define what data is important and ensure it is captured by all relevant members of your team. If you need to know the phone number of every contact in your system, for example, ensure it’s set as such during contact creation.

5. Involve Your Team

Another major stumbling block for even the best lead management processes is adoption. In a fast-paced environment like commercial real estate, it can be difficult to get buy-in from every member of your team overnight. But the more resources you provide and support you offer to those who are new to the system, the faster they will adopt the new processes, and the more effective your systems will be.

How do you do this?

You focus on collaboration. No one is the “sole owner” of a lead. At any point, someone in marketing might use contact properties to populate a campaign. Someone in tenant management might review a record or leave a note. So it’s important to emphasize that this is a collaborative effort and that everyone is helping the team as a whole to perform better by using a CRM effectively.

If more users can add notes, comments, and activities, more information is available for every lead, and each person can do their job better.

Getting the Most from Your Lead Management System

The right commercial real estate lead management system can help improve almost every aspect of your business. It provides an easy-to-use system with only the tools and features needed for commercial real estate transactions and tenant management.