In 2016, fledgling CBRE broker Evan Fiddle sat in a meeting with industry veterans Mary Ann Tighe and Paul Myers. Tighe told Fiddle to be prepared to discuss a recent news article with clients.
Like any good student, Fiddle, then 25, went back to his desk and looked up the article, about companies flocking from Midtown to Hudson Yards. He crafted a 594-word response and posted it on LinkedIn.
“That was my first long-form post and it resonated with people,” Fiddle, an English major at Amherst College who followed his dad Howard into brokerage, said. “And so I just kept doing it.”
While residential real estate agents upload photo carousels to hashtag-laden Instagram grids, commercial brokers are starting to hone their social media strategies. A small but serious new crop of brokers believes that LinkedIn is the place to network and build online brands. They are reaching wide audiences of the very people who might sign new office leases or consider an investment property with hopefully viral takes on the market and sleek videos from inside some of Manhattan’s premier office towers.
As commercial brokerages grow into conglomerates with tens of thousands of employees, social media, especially LinkedIn, can make it easier for a young broker at a big firm to stand out.
Though their posts are also a window into the sometimes opaque world of commercial brokerage, where deals get obscured by confidentiality agreements and the privacy preferences of prickly clients, the return on investment — especially amid algorithm changes and ever-shorter audience attention spans — is still not entirely clear. Posting might make “connections” but can it land its aficionados enough deals to balance the risks?
Most firms prefer to manage — or at least monitor — what their employees say publicly (the broker interviews for this story were all supervised by public relations specialists), so commercial brokers have to tread carefully. And attracting too much personal attention can sometimes put brokers at odds with their employers. Just ask Bob Knakal, who was fired from JLL last February amid whispers that his relentless self-promotion in traditional media and on social platforms like Twitter had irked the higher-ups at the firm.
“I think at the large firms, the preference is they don’t really want people to promote their personal brand,” Knakal said. “I think it’s all about the company, and that’s great for the company but not great for the individual. And I think that if you look at social media, it is nothing more than a personal branding device.”
The Jon Gray effect
No longer the media platform only for corporate job seekers and fleece-vested finance bros, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has features that millennials on upward career trajectories love: an endless newsfeed, easy-to-post videos and earnest commenters. Users at upper seniority levels from every industry now click and scroll there frequently: More than a billion users view more than 1.6 million feed updates per minute, according to the company.
For commercial real estate, boilerplate summaries of closings and lease signings have been replaced with spontaneous, thoughtful content, the kind of message that can communicate a personal brand.
“It is never a good place to just say ‘I’m proud to share that we just closed X, Y and Z deal,’” Savills broker Gabe Marans, who has more than 14,000 LinkedIn followers, said. “The platform has prioritized and elevated and celebrated thought leadership, which tends to enable the audience to stick around and engage longer.”
Fiddle has fine-tuned his LinkedIn posts over the years. They’re now shorter, conversational. They include anecdotes from his life as a broker for landlords and tenants. His 6,000 followers also get glimpses of his personal life. He recently posted photos from a trip to Chile and his baby’s gender reveal. (It’s a girl!)
“I take what was just an idea and I work on writing it out over my 30-minute walk to work, and I will either post it from my cell phone before coming up the elevator or right when I come in,” Fiddle said. “It’s a fun, creative practice.”
Fiddle started one recent post with an anecdote his fellow brokers could relate to:
“Who wouldn’t want to see the top floor of the General Motors building and a view of Central Park? Theoretically, the only people who do see that are people who are able to sign a lease for multi millions of dollars on an annual basis.”
“There is no escaping bad blows in commercial real estate brokerage,” he penned.
“My December was filled with them. Yesterday, at 6 p.m., I received another. Welcome 2025….”
So far, Fiddle appears to be among a handful of commercial brokers from his generation to experiment with more spontaneous content. But one prominent commercial real estate figure is also embracing a casual form of posting: Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, Jon Gray. The 54-year-old billionaire’s guerilla-style running videos shot from different locations around the world make him seem relatable, not just insightful.
“I used to, when I was traveling around the world, take little videos and send it to my wife and four daughters just so they remembered I existed, like, ‘Hey, here’s your dad. He’s in Sydney, jogging at the opera house,’” Gray said on S&P Global’s podcast in October. “I sort of took that and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we throw that on to LinkedIn?’ And people, I think, really appreciate the human element because they see you’re struggling with the same thing.”
Gray regularly posts LinkedIn videos, sometimes filmed by a family member. And he’s not alone. Other C-suite executives communicate casually with employees on LinkedIn, while entry-level workers try to grab the attention of senior colleagues.
“For those still questioning the importance of building an audience, look no further than Jon Gray,” Don Tepman, who runs the real estate investment fund TownCentre Capital and built a massive social media brand under the name @StripMallGuy, added. “If that’s not a clear signal to take social media seriously, I don’t know what is.”
Video killed the social media star
Video is one of the fastest-growing formats on LinkedIn, with viewership up 36 percent year-over-year. Marans, 38, was an early adopter. Six years ago, he started posting clips called “60 seconds with Gabe” that provided snapshots of what he was seeing on the ground as a tenant broker. The schtick: A clock in the corner counted down 60 seconds.
“Part of the challenge in a business that is as competitive as New York City real estate is trying to find ways to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd,” Marans said. “At the beginning, all I knew was that this was a tool. I didn’t yet know how it would be or could be leveraged, but I was willing to give it a try.”
JLL broker Peter Michailidis took a cue from residential brokers and started posting behind-the-scenes tours two years ago from exclusive Manhattan office buildings. In the videos, the 32-year-old tenant broker leads his 2,500 followers through renovated lobbies and sleek lounges as music plays in the background.
“Who wouldn’t want to see the top floor of the General Motors building and a view of Central Park?” Michailidis said. “Theoretically, the only people who do see that are people who are able to sign a lease for multi millions of dollars on an annual basis.”
The feedback on the posts was immediate. He heard from existing and prospective clients, colleagues and competitors, he said.
“I’ve definitely seen, at the bare minimum, an increase in the referrals I’ve been getting,” Michailidis said. “I think that that could be directly correlated to the subliminal way of just staying top of mind, right?”
Doing deals
Brokers say the attention to their online presence results in new business and connections with senior colleagues they would not have otherwise met.
Not long after Fiddle turned LinkedIn-ing into a regular practice, in 2020, he reflected on his blog about the business outcomes, like: “Increased introductions, like Russ introducing me to Dan, who is building cool software at Dojo, and Cam connecting me with Jeff, who also writes on commercial real estate.”
More important, Fiddle’s LinkedIn page caught the attention of industry players, including BXP’s Andrew Levin, Tishman Speyer’s Greg Conen and Brookfield Properties’ Duncan McCuaig. His online profile resulted in a real-life meeting with Vornado’s co-head of real estate Glenn Weiss.
“He messaged me and we got breakfast, just all through LinkedIn,” Fiddle said. “The access to these people — I think it’s a differentiator.”
Since LinkedIn users can’t be anonymous, unlike those on platforms like X and Instagram, brokers say it is a more direct pipeline to the industry.
“What I understood LinkedIn to be was kind of the uncool platform that people couldn’t pull themselves away from,” Marans said. “Real estate professionals were on it to network and sell, but on the office leasing front, tenants were also on it. If they were executives, they were using it to communicate with their employee base.”
“I think the preference is that [the brokerages] don’t really want people to promote their personal brand. It’s all about the company, and that’s great for the company but not great for the individual.”
Fiddle said friends from high school, college and camp had found him on LinkedIn. Some of them also work in real estate. In 2023, a friend from Amherst reached out to Fiddle on the platform because her company was looking for office space.
Fiddle brokered their lease deal, then an expansion within 18 months. The thing was working.
“If you’re a broker who is, you know, solely into tech and selling into some of those people, you might want to use Twitter,” Fiddle said.
Promising leads in most other industries tend to live on LinkedIn, he said.
Whose brand?
Brokers say they are mindful of what they post on social media, but some firms seem to feel more comfortable with employees chattering on LinkedIn than on other platforms. Fiddle’s bio on the CBRE website, for example, notes that he “regularly posts to his LinkedIn account.”
Officially, the firm’s social media policy encourages employees to “think before you post” and “ensure that both professional and personal social media accounts are respectful to all individuals, groups and organizations,” a CBRE spokesperson said. Fiddle said he is “always conscious” that his posts are a reflection of his employer.
JLL “provides all brokers with best social media practices and guidelines,” a company spokesperson said. Michailidis said he viewed LinkedIn as a way to promote the company, not himself.
“Residential brokers focus on their personal brand,” Michailidis said. “For me, it’s me being an extension of what the JLL brand is, and giving people the inside scoop in terms of what we do, what product is out there, what’s going on in the market.”
There’s a feeling among some insiders that brokerages without social media are missing out.
“Many in the real estate world still don’t recognize the critical role social media plays in their business, and that’s a major blind spot,” Tepman — @Stripmallguy — said.
Knakal predicted that the big brokerages will have no choice but to embrace social media eventually.
“A lot of these folks that are coming into the workforce now have been on social media for all their adult life,” Knakal said. “So to all of a sudden tell somebody that you can’t be active is going to be problematic in terms of being able to hire, unless you become more liberal about what people are able to do.”