So, here’s the good news.

Prospects are bright for commercial real estate. Eighty percent of respondents to a recent Deloitte Financial Services Center industry survey expect revenues to increase next year compared to this one.

But there are challenges, too.

Getting people back to work in the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation is a chore for even major players in CRE as well as other businesses across America.

Sustainability, climate change awareness and advanced technology are all the buzz in commercial real estate, but many companies admitted in the Deloitte survey they are ill-prepared to respond. Most say they are only in the early stages of addressing clients’ push on the sustainability front, and more than three-fourths of respondents still are relying on legacy core systems.

Changing it all costs money, driving up the need to make more, not only to enhance profitability but to reinvest in the business. At least some firms will forget a key to making that happen.

Commercial Real Estate Marketing in Good Times and Bad

In good times and bad, decision-makers are prone to neglect the thing that matters most in growing their business: marketing it. That can be a difference-maker as a year unfolds, keeping prosperity alive when commercial real estate is moving and breathing life back into the business when sales are down.

Now is the time to use your marketing budget, wrapping up the year and getting started on the next. Updating commercial real estate flyers, polishing website content and compiling sharp offering memorandums that not only push the property but position the firm as a serious player are essentials to driving a CRE company to the next level.

All this is imperative in a moment of transformation in the commercial real estate industry. Deloitte put it this way: “After nearly 2 years of change not seen in many generations, the CRE industry is at an inflection point. Which way will it go?”

Clients Won’t Magically Appear

More to the point for those in leadership at commercial real estate firms: Which way will their business go? Just as fears developed over the future of CRE amid the pandemic, the business turned bullish. Tech is seeking out office space, led by Google, which announced in September plans to spend $2.1 billion on a 1.3 million square-foot waterfront office building on Manhattan’s West Side. That demonstrated how greatly rumors of office buildings’ demise had been exaggerated.

Although business slowed elsewhere around the globe, prices and deal volume both registered healthy gains in North America year-over-year and show no signs of slowing.

But anyone who’s been in the biz long enough to know how it works recognizes that clients won’t magically appear and they won’t magically stick once they’ve been landed. That’s true even when a sales staff is lights out. The business needs to be marketed, and that effort needs to be strategic in every aspect, in materials such as flyers, brochures and memorandums put into prospects’ hands and online in all the content the hidden eyes of potential clients see before sellers get the chance to make their pitch.

None of that happens without a plan and budget. Those who go into the new year without a strong, well-conceived CRE marketing blueprint risk falling behind the pack and getting left in the dust of a sector still on the rise.

Give us a call at (317) 793-9014 or email us for a free consultation to discuss your commercial real estate marketing needs.