The New Language of Commercial Real Estate Marketing

The New Language of Commercial Real Estate Marketing

By Armon Golliday, Vice President of Marketing and Tenant Relations, Gaedeke Group

I’ve been in commercial real estate marketing for over 20 years, starting at Marcus & Millichap, then CBRE, and now at Gaedeke Group, where I lead marketing and tenant relations across a portfolio that spans DFW, New York, Washington D.C., and Miami. In that time, I’ve watched this industry change in ways I didn’t always see coming. Some of it has been exciting. Some of it has been humbling. All of it has made me better at the job.

The biggest shift isn’t technology. It’s expectations.

Tenants Have Changed. The Marketing Has to Change With Them.

For a long time, CRE marketing was essentially an information delivery system. Here’s the building. Here are the specs. Here’s the rate. Call your broker. That worked when tenants were making decisions primarily on economics and proximity. It doesn’t work as well anymore.

Today’s tenants, especially the ones making decisions about where their people are going to spend 40 or 50 hours a week, are thinking about experience. They’re thinking about whether the building reflects their culture, whether the environment supports the way their teams actually work, whether the ownership group is someone they want a long-term relationship with. Those aren’t questions a flyer answers.

So the marketing has had to grow up. It has to tell a fuller story. Not just what a building has, but what it feels like to be in it, and who’s behind it.

The Return-to-Office Moment Was a Test

The post-pandemic period forced a real reckoning. The buildings that struggled were largely the ones that had been coasting. The ones that came back strong had something genuine to say about themselves. Good design. Real amenities. Ownership that had actually invested in the product.

That convergence of product and message matters more than people realize. You can’t market your way out of a bad building. But you can absolutely under-market a good one. What I’ve seen work is when the physical experience and the story being told about it are completely aligned. When a broker walks a prospect through and the building delivers on everything the marketing promised. That’s when it closes.

Content Is a Long Game, and Most Owners Aren’t Playing It

One of the things I’ve invested in at Gaedeke is building a genuine editorial voice for the company. We publish a series called The Current that covers market trends, ownership philosophy, and what’s happening across our portfolio. It’s not promotional. It’s not a newsletter. It’s point-of-view content that treats brokers and tenants like the intelligent professionals they are.

The return on that kind of content isn’t immediate. It builds over time. A broker who has engaged with three or four issues of The Current has a different relationship with us than one who has only seen a property brochure. They understand how we think. They trust that we’re serious operators. That trust shows up in conversations, and eventually in deals.

Most ownership groups either don’t produce content at all or produce content that reads like it was written by a committee. The space for operators who are willing to invest in real storytelling is genuinely wide open.

On AI: It’s Powerful, But Nothing Replaces Human Judgment

I use AI tools in my work. They’ve made parts of the job faster, drafting, research, synthesis. I’m not dismissive of what they can do. But I think the industry is in a phase right now where a lot of people are confusing capability with strategy, and speed with quality.

AI doesn’t know your building. It doesn’t know your market relationships. It doesn’t have the instinct that comes from sitting across the table from a tenant for years and understanding what they actually need. The marketers getting the most out of these tools are the ones using them to move faster on execution while keeping their own judgment in the driver’s seat. That’s where I try to live.

What Hasn’t Changed

For all the shifts in tools, channels, and tenant expectations, the core of this job is the same as it’s always been. It’s about trust. Building it with brokers. Earning it with tenants. Maintaining it through every interaction with a property, a piece of content, a renewal conversation.

That doesn’t come from a platform or a campaign. It comes from showing up consistently, knowing your product deeply, and being honest about what you can deliver. That’s true whether you’re marketing a single asset in Addison or a mixed-use tower in Miami.

The work is harder than it used to be. The bar is higher. But for the people who take it seriously, it’s also a more interesting industry to be in than it’s ever been.