As the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a drop in commercial real estate tenancy, more firms are now looking for ways to find tenants.
A new Chicago tech company thinks it can help.
RealtyAds is a cloud-based software platform that uses artificial intelligence to help commercial real estate firms advertise office, industrial and retail space on social media. The company says it can help real estate firms reach 85% more of their target audience than other advertising models.
RealtyAds’ dashboard show users real-time analytics on how their posts are performing, and allows them to specify ads based on their budget and target audience.
“We’re trying to marry a broker’s knowledge with the marketing efforts,” RealtyAds co-founder and President Trevor Marticke told me.
RealtyAds has clients across 52 markets in the U.S. and Canada, which include JLL, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Telos, Stream, Newmark and Transwestern Commercial Services. Combined, RealtyAds' clients represent 195 million square feet of commercial real estate. Firms have used RealtyAds to advertise office space in local buildings like the Willis Tower and The Merchandise Mart, Marticke said.
Marticke, who previously worked at Transwestern and Cushman & Wakefield, launched RealtyAds in 2019 with his co-founder Keegan Kuhn, who is also the founder of a Chicago-based automotive advertising platform called Progressus Media, which was acquired by CDK Global in 2018. Now, RealtyAds has grown to employ eight people.
“Me and Keegan started thinking outside the box about what commercial real estate could be and should be doing differently,” Marticke said. “And one of the obvious answers to that was leveraging social media.”
Though the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the commercial real estate industry significantly, with Chicago’s downtown office vacancy rate hitting a record high at 18% at the end of 2020, according to real estate services firm CBRE, Marticke said it created circumstances in which more real estate managers were looking to advertise their spaces in an effort to fill them.
“While March and April were challenging, one of the things that we saw was an acceleration of ownership groups realizing they need to create a digital presence for physical assets,” Marticke said. “I think RealtyAds was not only the easiest way to accomplish that task, but I’d also say the most effective solution."
