Commercial real estate SEO: property pages, broker pages and search for the space you lease and sell

How does commercial real estate SEO work?

Commercial real estate SEO is aimed at three groups, and each one comes to a brokerage’s pages, or to an owner’s, looking for something different:

• Tenants: the available space, sorted by building type, size and city.
• Buyers and investors: the properties for sale, and the markets and property types a brokerage covers.
• Owners: which brokers lease and sell buildings like theirs, and in which markets.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2018 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey estimated 5.9 million commercial buildings in the US, with 96,423 million square feet of floorspace between them. Warehouse and storage buildings held the most floorspace, 17,483 million square feet, and offices came next, with 16,662 million; shops and malls, which the survey groups as mercantile, held 10,781 million.

So the site gives every building type and market its own pages, each written for the tenant, buyer or owner who would read it. Our real estate marketing page holds the disclosure and fair housing rules for any California brokerage’s ads; here we cover what changes when the space is commercial. Selling homes is covered on real estate agents, and managing apartments and rented homes for their owners on property management.

Whose website is it: a brokerage’s or an owner’s?

That decides what the site has to show. The DRE’s Real Estate Advertising Guidelines set out who needs a license (Business and Professions Code 10130 and 10131):

• Acting for others: a person who acts on another’s behalf, expects or receives pay, and leases or rents property, offers it for rent, solicits tenants or listings of places for rent, negotiates the sale, purchase or exchange of leases, collects rents, or solicits sellers or buyers, needs a real estate license.
• Acting for yourself: a principal acting on its own behalf needs none, which covers an owner leasing space in buildings it owns.
• Advertising: a person must hold the license before advertising as a broker or salesperson, and acting without one can bring administrative, civil and criminal sanctions. Where in doubt, the guidelines say to check with the DRE before starting.

A brokerage’s website is first point of contact material under the DRE’s disclosure rules, and so are its promotional and advertising flyers and brochures. Where a flyer names more than one licensee, the rule asks for the license number of each, and our real estate marketing page sets out the rest of what each piece carries. On an owner’s site that names an outside broker as the leasing contact, we would have that broker review how its name and license number appear. Ads for apartments in a mixed-use building still fall under the federal fair housing rule, since the law counts any part of a building occupied or designed as a residence as a dwelling (42 U.S.C. 3602(b) and 3604(c)).

What should commercial real estate website design include?

Commercial real estate web design starts from the space itself: a warehouse, an office suite and a storefront each get pages of their own, with the facts a tenant or buyer of that kind of space needs. The site we would build holds:

• Available space: a page for each property or suite, fed from your listing database where it offers a feed, so a space leaves the site once it is taken.
• Building types and markets: a page for each type of property you lease or sell and each market you cover, where search demand and your listings back it.
• Broker pages: each broker’s markets, property types and license number.
• Flyers Google can read: each flyer posted as a PDF, with its main facts repeated as text on the property page.
• Closed deals: shown only with each client’s agreement, and only the details they clear.
• Market reports: written as pages, with the PDF linked beside each one.
• Tracking and redirects: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics connected before launch, and on a move, each page of the old site redirected to its new address.

Our real estate website design page covers brokerage sites in general, and web design the way we plan and build any site.

What does commercial real estate SEO include?

Each month, the search work we would do for a commercial brokerage or an owner covers:

• The office’s Business Profile: Google lists rental and for-sale properties as ineligible, so a building for lease can’t have a profile of its own. Your leasing office can, if it meets customers in person during its stated hours, and the property pages do the work a profile can’t.
• Repairs before new pages: titles and descriptions corrected, structured data added where it is missing, re-index requests sent and overlapping posts merged.
• Pages people search for: property, building type and market pages with markup, and an article each month, such as a market update or a guide for tenants.
• Links that are earned: mentions from partners you work with, associations you belong to and local news, never paid for.
• AI answers: pages written so they are easier for AI answers to find, read and cite, and monthly tracking of how often AI answers mention your brokerage.
• Reports: a weekly site check, a monthly look at your links, a one-page report at the end of each month that puts inquiries at the top, and a quarterly review of the plan.

Our real estate SEO page covers search for any brokerage, and SEO our plan for any business.

What would we build behind a commercial brokerage’s site?

The systems behind the site start from the property. For a commercial brokerage, we would build:

1. Routing by property: an inquiry about a listing goes to the broker on that listing, with the page it came from.
2. Tours: tour requests offer only the times each broker has opened, and a booked tour goes straight onto that broker’s calendar.
3. Offering memoranda behind a signature: where your brokerage shares an offering memorandum only under a confidentiality agreement, the request form sends the agreement for e-signature and releases the document once it is signed.
4. One record per company: every contact, inquiry, tour and deal for a tenant or investor kept together, in your current CRM if it can take the data, or in a CRM we build for you.
5. Inquiry tags: an AI step marks each new inquiry with the property type, size and move-in date it mentions, for the broker to check before replying.
6. Reporting by source: each signed lease or sale traced back to the page or search that started it.

A sale that closes through escrow hands off to title and escrow offices, whose systems we cover on title company automation.

How should a brokerage choose a commercial real estate marketing agency?

Before you hire anyone for commercial real estate marketing, read Google’s own guide to hiring an SEO. It says an audit should give you realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved, and it tells you to be careful of a company that is secretive or won’t clearly explain what it intends to do. Google says it doesn’t evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, so be wary of any tool sold as approved by Google, and it warns that deceptive or misleading content created on your behalf could get your site removed entirely from Google’s index. For a commercial brokerage, add these:

• Confidential deals: how it handles listings and deals you can’t make public, and who on its side sees them.
• Listing data: how property pages stay in step with your listing database.
• Your approval: who signs off on each page before it goes live, and how fast a taken space comes down.
• Competing brokerages: whether it already works for a brokerage chasing the same owners and tenants, and how it keeps that work separate.
• Paid ads: we don’t run ads, so if you want them on search engines, social media or listing sites, plan for a specialist who does.

Bring the list to the call, and we will answer each point.

How would a commercial brokerage start working with us?

Every engagement starts with a 15-minute call, here about the properties you lease and sell and the markets you cover. You talk with Nicolas Perez or Noah Alvarez, our co-founders. When the work suits what you need, a written proposal follows with its scope and cost, and we start only after you approve it; when it doesn’t, you hear so on the call. Formed in 2023, Midnite Systems works from our office in Valencia, California, with businesses across the US.