Real estate pros are starting to use social media to tout new business and land clients.
The founders of full-service commercial brokerage Current Real Estate Advisors has focused on Instagram to develop its retail and office leasing business. “We are a publicly facing firm and have a huge presence on social media to attract companies to use our real estate services and our media platform,” says Adam Henick, co-founder of Current, which has nearly 20,000 followers @Current RealEstate.
“It used to be, ‘Is the CEO on Instagram?’ and it was ‘No way,’ and now, of course, they are,” says Brandon Charnas, Current’s other co-founder, who has 90,000 followers on his own account @BrandonCharnas. “We have been building this over 10 years and have an engaged community. We understand the power of social media.”
Current is also leveraging the savvy of Charnas’ wife, Arielle, to provide additional allure to their customers.
“I saw these brands paying her $50,000 for one post,” Charnas recalls of his wife’s fashion-focused Instagram account, @ArielleCharnas, which has over 1.2 million followers and spawned her lifestyle brand Something Navy. He says he began thinking, “How can I monetize this engaged audience to provide additional marketing for our clients?”
Along with product shots, Current’s own postings offer real estate advice, tips and client spotlights.
“We post on a regular basis on behalf of our clients — whether a walkthrough of their store and their new products to a Labor Day sale along with others that will drive customers and sales,” says Henick. “It’s the value proposition for using us.”
To keep up with their clients, they have full-time employees who focus only on social media.
The brokerage has found clients who also believe social media is essential to business growth. Cosmetics company Charlotte Tilbury, named for the British makeup artist, has 3 million followers @CTilburyMakeup. The brand signed on with Current and rented a space at 148 Lafayette St. in Soho.
Soon after, Current found the San Francisco-based Museum of Ice Cream — with 394,500 followers @MuseumOfIceCream — a local office at 99 Hudson St. and a permanent museum space at 558 Broadway.
The doors of the dessert-themed experience will open Dec. 14. The museum had a wildly successful pop-up run in the Meatpacking District in 2016.
Charnas, an attorney by training, has found that social media marketing helps reduce customer acquisition costs and creates a buzz around a property for their clients.
In 2015, for example, Charnas convinced a longtime owner to sell 670 Broadway — located at the corner of Bond Street in Noho — to Paramount for $112 million by bringing in Equinox as the retail tenant. Yet a few years later, the rest of the building was still fallow.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we create images and call the property Zero Bond?’ ” he recalls. After they obtained the “0” address and created images of the building with a roof deck and other features, the cool branding and marketing worked. Activewear retailer Bandier signed on, along with a new club by 1Oak founder Scott Sartiano.
In February, Paramount sold the property for $130.5 million to German investors.
In a recent residential foray, Current posted a video of the penthouse rental at 70 Pine St. “It reached 50,000 views and included a swipe up to fill out the application,” Charnas says. It was rented to someone who saw the post.
Current’s pitch to retailers is, Charnas adds, is “let us find you your headquarters and your retail space and you will get your customers for free.”
For Bandier, for instance, Current uses its social media accounts to conduct instant polls and surveys that help identify new locations for the brand. “One click of a button and I can reach hundreds of thousands of active consumers,” he says.
While Charnas has made his brand an essential part of Current’s brand, other executives are staying in the shadows as their social media forays take the spotlight.
The Instagram and Twitter handles @TradedNY, for example, has 26,200 followers who track its posts announcing the latest commercial real estate deals and financings. But its two founders, who started it as a fun hobby in 2014, decided to remain anonymous, in part out of fear that if industry professionals knew who they were, no one would tell them about the latest transactions.
Along with the address, amount, square footage and names of buyers, sellers and brokers, each carefully curated Traded post includes images of the building in question overlaid with photos of all the key players — a difficult task in a city where top transactors are notoriously camera shy.
“We are applying the internet to the standard ways of doing business and people are starting to adapt,” a Traded principal noted. For instance, the posts are tagged with the deal principals’ own social media accounts. Young brokers quickly began using their own names rather than their prior punny or juvenile handles.
For the Instagram-averse, newsletters have also become a hot ticket for sharing real estate intel. Celebrating its first year, the Real Estate Daily Beat is a short and sweet blog that summarizes a handful of transactions and financings along with important tech industry items.
It started so real estate executive Joe Richter could keep his techie brother, Jake, informed about the field.
The brothers now work together to digest and dissect the transactions for their readers. “They don’t want to have to click through to a website to read stories,” says Joe. Most of the items are tailored to millennials and tech entrepreneurs, Jake adds.
Along with basic stats, each post includes what makes the deal or financing important. “We get to the point right away,” says Joe.
