We analyzed Manhattan’s 3,002 office buildings to see how they’re being marketed. And some results are surprising: Today we're publishing Trophy's first market report, and the first report ever made on Manhattan office marketing. Big brokerages publish reports on rent, vacancy, and absorption. Nobody tracks this: how buildings and owners MARKET those spaces. So, being Manhattan office marketing specialists, we decided to find out. We broken down the entire Manhattan office leasing stock by class and submarket, and researched each one. Some numbers: - Even in Class A, 60% of buildings don't have a dedicated website. - The Plaza District: fewer than 1 in 3 buildings has a dedicated website. - Across the 2,639-building competitive set, 67% have nothing online beyond listings. An office lease is one of the biggest decisions a company makes. And like every big decision today, a lot happens online. Brokers are more likely to remember a building with strong marketing presence. Tenants are more likely to pass around an easy and impressive website link. The impression it leaves can change the course of the deal. Most buildings are leaving that impression to chance. We spent over a year on this, and we're sharing it now for free: trophy.inc/research Let me know if you’re curious about the data or the results.

We just kicked off a new project, and walked away with a good reminder of how low the bar for office marketing is. It's low enough that just having a real website puts a building on a different level than almost everything around it. Especially in the Class B space. Where most owners are old school. They don't invest in marketing at all - they do the bare minimum and lease their space at whatever it takes. So if you put even a little real effort into how your building shows up, you're already light years ahead of the building next door. This isn't a reason to coast. With every project, we want the client over the moon when they see the result. The low bar is exactly why marketing is such a strong bet right now. Every dollar you put into your building's marketing has an outsized return - not because marketing got cheaper, but because almost nobody else is doing it.

Your building has 2 first impressions: The one people experience when they walk through the door and meet you - The new lobby, the nice finishes, the landlord that picks up the phone. And the one a prospective tenant's CFO sees when he Googles your address before greenlighting the lease. The problem is that for most buildings - those reputations are completely different. Owners invest so much in their buildings, and every lease has so me much financial impact. But the first thing people find online is a generic Loopnet page and some 3 y/o photos (and EVERYBODY looks up the building before they sign a lease). No dedicated site. No story. Nothing about what makes this building different from the five others on the shortlist. Some of the stakeholders have been to the tour and met you, but some haven’t. So what they see online (and the bunch of PDFs and scattered files they got during the process) is all they have to go on. That’s why in today’s world you have to invest in your web presence and digital first impression.