Creating a 'buzz' for your properties - real estate firms use CD-ROM buzz cards to market properties - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

This much is true about members of the commercial real estate industry: No one will ever accuse us of being "techies."

While most of the business world has been swept up in the Internet revolutions, commercial real estate firms have been admittedly a bit slow on the uptake. Rather than marketing our properties in a virtual environment, campaigns still consist largely of tires and true methods.

Prospective tenants and brokerage firms are inundated with traditional direct mailings -- referred to as "snail mail" in the high-tech world -- as firms attempt to distinguish themselves and build a rapport.

However, in the face of decreasing space in key markets and the intense competition for space by the same Internet startups driving the new economy, one question arises: How can commercial real estate firms tap into technology to climb over the paper mountain and gain a competitive advantage"

Enter the buzz card.

A two-inch CD-ROM that can be cut into an array of different shapes, the buzz card takes brokers or prospective tenants on a virtual tour of your properties, allowing the integration of features such as music and animation into a presentation that could never be captured in a two-dimensional folder.

Where this once might have been a gimmick tool, the pervasiveness of the Internet has changed the rules. The buzz cards link users directly to your firm's Web site, driving traffic that might otherwise not find its way. Recent analysis has shown that buzz cards can drive up to 15 percent of their users to a company's site, compared to the paltry one percent response rate achieved through direct mail.

At Leggat McCall Properties, the primary focus of our recent buzz card campaign was the marketing of Four Penn Center, our 525,000-square-foot office building in Center City Philadelphia and the largest piece of contiguous space in the Philadelphia market.

We had used the cards once before to market a 400,000-square-foot project in Waltham, Mass., close to the backyard of our Boston office. The space was leased out in three months. The foals for the Philadelphia launch were different. Our name and presence in Philadelphia wasn't nearly as well-established as it is in Boston, a cause for some concern as we prepared to market our largest current property.

Through the use of the buzz cards, we managed to convey our "We've Got Space" message to prospective tenants with colorful animation that accompanied detailed maps and renderings of Four Penn Center, as well as smaller properties in suburban Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

To date, the response to the buzz cards has been overwhelmingly positive based on the calls and e-mails coming into our Philadelphia office.

One thing to remember, however, is that the buzz cards are by no means a replacement for traditional marketing; rather they are a complement. Each of the 2,000 buzz cards we sent out were followed up with standard direct mailings in the hope that the name recognition would already be there because of the buzz card.

Despite the work that goes into preparing buzz cards -- typical presentations take two and a half to three months to complete -- they are relatively cost effective based on the scale to which they are used.

The inspiration for Leggat's buzz cards came from Fidelity Investments, which used the cards to launch its Powerstreet online trading Web site. By comparison to Leggat's modest mailing, Fidelity sent out nearly 1.5 million cards.

The production costs usually range anywhere from $40,000-$60,000 for the initial video and graphics presentation, compared to $100,000-$200,000 for a full-size CD. Reproduction can be anywhere from 75 cents to $4 depending on volume, keeping costs down for the real estae firm targeting a specific audience.

Likewise, the cost of mailing buzz cards is typically the same as sending an initial paper presentation.

As technology continues to advance, one would imaging that the CD-ROM presentation might lose some of its novelty, even in the behind-the-times world of real estate.

The buzz card's effectiveness, however, cannot be discounted. It is an easy-to-use method of impressing a potential new client that packs a "cool factor" not generally associated with commercial real estate marketing.

While buzz cards may represent little more than sticking one's toe in the technological ocean, the real estate firms that are willing to test the waters may find they are the bigger fish when all is said and done.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Hagedorn Publication
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group