Real Estate and PR

David Grant

Real estate often gets a bad reputation. For many, it brings up images of crookedness, bottom feeders and sleaze.

But after representing dozens of real estate professionals for decades, I can report that the great majority of them are, in fact, honorable visionaries who do their jobs as well and as honorably as—well, most PR people.

Getting them good media attention helps. To do that requires a solid client—and the use of solid public relations tools.

For example, the owners of the Capri, a high-rise apartment building on the east side of Manhattan, retained us to increase the property's visibility. After meeting with the client, we were able to place the Capri in “The Hunt” column of the New York Times. In addition, a Capri representative was interviewed by the reporter for an online video that appeared on NYTimes.com. The article and video produced just what the client wanted. A prospective home buyer had been searching for his dream property for over a year. After reading the Times article, he made an appointment to visit the sales center that weekend—and bought an apartment in the seven figures.

And when Sony informed real estate developer Sherwood Equities—our client and also a principal owner of One Times Square, the historic Manhattan building where the New Year's Eve ball is dropped—that it would not be renewing its lease on the extraordinarily high-profile space where its Sony “JumboTron” was displayed, the client had several concerns. He feared that such a potentially big story as the Sony defection would leak out without direction, making it difficult to put in proper perspective, as well as adequately represent his point of view.

Accordingly, I recommended a strategy with two goals. First, we wanted to prevent a negative leak; second, we wanted to alert others that the famous sign space would now be available. With this in mind, we proposed a selective and carefully orchestrated publicity campaign. The result was not only that our client was repeatedly quoted, placing the Sony decision in proper perspective, but that NBC read—in a major story we placed in the New York Times—about the availability of the space and then signed a lucrative multi-year contract with our client to rent the space for its own high-tech display.

To help market 60 Pineapple Street, a landmark cooperative conversion apartment building in Brooklyn Heights, we undertook a publicity campaign on behalf of MJR Development Corp. In addition to trade publicity, and placing a variety of press releases in mass media, we were able to arrange a very favorable New York Times Friday residential column, and—some weeks after that—a New York Times Sunday real estate section lead article covering the inducements being offered by developers in Brooklyn Heights. The client told us he took binders on one‑fourth of the building the weekend after the Friday column appeared. That building became the most successful in its area.

One last example: On behalf of the Durst Organization, we undertook a campaign to publicize a housing renovation it was doing in Manhattan. As a result of our efforts, feature articles on the project, most with impressive photographs, appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Manhattan Cooperator, the New York Law Journal, the Real Estate Reporter and Real Estate Weekly. The articles—especially those in the New York Times, News and Post—brought a great deal of traffic to the on‑site sales office. In fact, on the Sunday that the New York Times story appeared, hundreds of potential buyers came to view the apartments. The developer also used the articles as reprints to hand to people who came to the project.

The lesson? Work for good real estate people, know the media who cover real estate and tell your clients’ stories with tried and true PR tools. Your clients will be pleased—and so will your (and their) bottom lines.

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David M. Grant is President of Grant PR.