CRE Marketing Jobs On The Chopping Block Amid Industry Slowdown

This holiday season appears to be a time of belt-tightening for companies in the struggling commercial real estate industry, and one type of role in particular is feeling the squeeze: marketing. 

With companies seeing reduced transaction volume and slowing development pipelines this year, firms from brokerage giants to regional development shops are looking for ways to cut costs. Several marketing professionals who spoke to Bisnow — four of whom have been laid off in recent months — say their jobs have become a top target in the industry’s latest wave of cutbacks. 

The cuts aren’t limited to firms in the disrupted office sector. Three multifamily development firms have laid off portions of their marketing teams in recent months, according to sources who lost their jobs with these companies: Toll Brothers Apartment Living, Morgan Properties and Foulger-Pratt. 

The companies each declined to comment on the layoffs, which totaled less than a dozen people but represented relatively large portions of their marketing teams. The laid-off employees, some of whom were granted anonymity due to sensitivities around their departures, and other commercial real estate hiring experts, say these cuts are emblematic of a larger shift happening in the industry. 

“I do see marketing teams and budgets being slashed across the country,” CRE Recruiting founder Allison Weiss said. “Companies think that this is one area where they can cut costs and expenditures and not have an immediate impact to their core businesses.”

The impact of marketing on a company’s revenues may not be as immediately visible as other roles like brokers or sales professionals, but longtime marketing professionals say there is an under-appreciated, long-term value in bolstering a company’s brand awareness and reaching new audiences to attract business.

They also say the commercial real estate industry has already fallen behind others in adapting marketing to digital media channels, and by laying off talented staff, some companies may never be able to catch up.

“Marketing is much harder to determine the ROI, but it’s like, what’s the ROI of hugging your mother?” Weiss said. “Marketing and social and things like that are very valuable and important, but it’s difficult to tie one particular website or social media post to an outcome.”

Industry-wide data on marketing layoffs is sparse, but a survey of 365 companies released last month by RCLCO and CEL Compensation Advisors shows the cautious attitudes around hiring marketing professionals. Of the companies surveyed, 15% said they anticipate hiring for marketing roles next year, down from 17% last year.

“For most [companies], they just don’t understand the impact of marketing,” said a marketing professional who was laid off from Morgan Properties this year. The source was granted anonymity because of their separation agreement. 

This professional said they were one of six marketing employees the company laid off on the same day in October. 

“Prior to that, the company had laid off other people, and after the layoff that happened in September, I already had a feeling I was next,” the source said. “It began to be very traumatic: Every day I’d wake up and say, ‘Is today the day?’ That was a traumatic experience.”

Morgan Properties  — a Pennsylvania-based multifamily investment firm that owns or manages more than 90,000 units across 19 states — in May posted on LinkedIn congratulating its marketing team for being recognized by the TITAN Business Awards as the marketing team of the year. The post included headshots and names of 20 marketing people at the firm. At least four of those are no longer with the company, according to their LinkedIn profiles. 

Morgan Properties declined to comment.

For Maryland-based Foulger-Pratt, the layoffs came in November as the company shifted to contract the management of its multifamily properties to Bozzuto. Half of its four-person marketing team took jobs at Bozzuto, while the other two were laid off. 

One of those laid off was Courtney Williams, who had served as Foulger-Pratt's director of marketing for five years. She used the layoff as an opportunity to start her own marketing consulting business, and she now does work for her former employer on a part-time basis. 

“People need high-level [marketing] expertise, but they can’t necessarily afford it full-time or don’t have portfolio size to support it full-time,” Williams told Bisnow. “So there’s huge demand for part-time consulting.”

While she has seen other developers in the multifamily and office sectors lay off marketing professionals, Williams said she has also seen some that are hiring to take advantage of the pool of talented marketing veterans now looking for jobs. 

“It’s a crazy shift happening on the real estate marketing side,” she said. “Everybody’s rethinking their approach.”

Toll Brothers laid off at least three marketing professionals in recent months, according to one of those who lost their job and was granted anonymity due to their separation agreement. The source attributed the cuts to the slowdown in the multifamily development sector.

“There might be a trend there in multifamily where the business model is dependent on the entire pipeline from acquisition, financing and construction to property management and leasing to keep the place full,” the source said. “It’s like the writer’s strike, it’s going to affect everybody in Hollywood. At some point, it’s going to affect everyone. Sometimes it’s like a slow-motion train wreck.”

The high interest rates and pullback from lenders this year have led to a sharp drop in new multifamily projects breaking ground. Nationwide residential construction starts in August reached their lowest level since the early part of the pandemic in 2020 after dropping 15% year-over-year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Multifamily firms are also facing pressure due to rising vacancies and flattening rents. U.S. apartment rent growth turned negative this summer for the first time since early 2021, and some are predicting it won't be until 2025 before rents start rising at normal levels again. 

Moshe Crane, a multifamily marketing expert who serves as vice president at Sage Ventures, said lagging occupancy and rent growth this year have led apartment owners and managers to make cuts. 

“There’s layoffs happening to mitigate risk and overhead,” he said. “Any time when things are uncertain, specifically in multifamily, people are trying to mitigate risk, there are positions that are ideal to try to cut back, and marketing seems to be one of those because, for most of them, marketing is easier to outsource.”

Big brokerage firms have also been laying off employees due to the market slowdown: JLL announced in March it would pursue $125M in cost savings this year, CBRE announced $150M in cuts in October, and Newmark announced another $25M of cuts in November after completing $50M.

While these announcements didn’t specifically single out marketing, Weiss said big brokerages have targeted the space, either by laying off marketing-specific staff or brokerage assistants who performed marketing functions. 

“One of the big places I see this occurring is in big brokerage,” Weiss said. “Certainly all the major players in the brokerage world have cut marketing teams, individual roles, hires, budgets, etc.”

As the industry adopts the “Stay Alive Till ‘25” mantra, Crane expects to see more marketing positions targeted for layoffs next year. 

“At this moment, it’s unknown when the market will recover, and as long as it continues on the path it is, I think we’ll see more layoffs and more ways of cutting costs,” Crane said. 

Many marketing professionals are also worried that increased use of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT could put their jobs at risk, said Wendy Simpson, senior vice president of marketing at multifamily firm Edgewood Management. 

“That’s the question of the year and probably the fear,” Simpson said of AI taking jobs. “Whether the conversation was in front of conferences or in backrooms, it’s how are we going to approach this?” 

Simpson said she has seen a series of firms lay off marketing professionals in recent months, but doesn’t know whether they were tied to AI or economic challenges. Crane said he hasn’t seen any examples of firms laying off marketing people directly because of AI, but he said there is a larger trend of centralizing operations to cut costs, and he said AI could help firms do that. 

​​“People might start looking for AI to replace some of the stuff they’re doing to lower overhead, just like we’re seeing that with leasing where people are turning to more AI options so they can reduce the number of people on site,” Crane said. 

Simpson knows what it feels like to be laid off during a downturn. She was let go by Aimco in January 2009. 

While the company helped with her subsequent job search and she landed a new position a few months later, she said it was scary to become unemployed during a time when the whole industry is cutting back. 

“For me, it ended up being a blessing, but it was tough and uncertain and felt like a blow at the time,” she said. 

CRE Recruiting’s Weiss said she remembers a large number of firms laying off marketing professionals during the Great Recession: “Marketing is always one of the first places, unfortunately, that this occurs.”

Weiss estimates that commercial real estate is a decade behind other industries when it comes to social media marketing, and she pointed to the rise of TikTok and the young people on the platform as making it critical for the industry to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing. 

“Commercial real estate can’t afford to cut marketing and not focus on social media and digital marketing, because we’re so far behind,” she said.