Property Mangement Company Operating Office Buildings and Malls

[gulliver]

Hi,

There is a property management company that operates as a separate entity that also does consulting, asset management, construction management and so on. At the same time the company operates different buildings that are either shopping malls or office buildings (or both) about 8 of them. All of them have separate names and are separate businesses by themselves.

• So added GMB for the company with a main category as "property management company"
• I'm going to claim the shopping mall GMB listings

I'm not sure what to do with the "properties" which are office buildings only. Didn't find an appropriate category in GMB and don't want to create problems even before starting.

Advice is much appreciated .

Thanks.

 

[James Watt]

My knowledge of commercial real estate legal code is about the same as my knowledge of how rocket trajectories are calculated for NASA probe launches, but am I would be very surprised if those holdings (malls, etc) weren't separately incorporated legal entities. Even if they weren't though, let's look at this from Google's perspective.

Google's goal is to provide relevant information to a searcher. If this company is a consulting company, and a property management company available for hire, it makes sense for it to have it's own GMB page.

The mall also needs it's own GMB page, there's going to be many people actively looking for hours and directions and other information related to the mall, so it absolutely needs it's own page.

Office buildings though? Look at the Google Guidelines:

Ineligible businesses:
Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.

Office buildings don't get a listing.

I'll also suggest a few best practices too, sorry if this is already obvious.

Claim and set up each business that deserves it's own listing on it's own GMB account. If possible, use an account with an @businesswebsite.com email. It won't help rankings or anything, but it does smooth things out considerably with certain problems that might require you to call into Google My Business support.

Set up each independent, unrelated (aside from parent corporation) business on it's own account. Multi location businesses should share an account, unrelated businesses should not. The number one reason for that, is that I've seen accounts with multiple owned businesses have all their businesses suspended for spam, even though only one of their businesses actually tripped a filter. I saw a case a few months ago with a consultant with over 60 businesses all in one account, all fried overnight because one of those businesses got flagged as spam. It's not uncommon.

Organizationally, you can safely have a central account with each business added as a 'manager', even if each business has it's own account under it's own domain name that actually owns the business. Instructions for adding a manager to a business are here. Hope that helps.

 

[gulliver]

Thanks James for the detailed reply. I believe we do need a GMB for the property management company as a separate business and the 3 malls they operate also are listed but not yet claimed. I usually do claim with client accounts and set us as manager of the accounts so unless clients tell us other otherwise.

Office buildings though? Look at the Google Guidelines:


Ineligible businesses:
Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes, model homes or vacant apartments. Sales or leasing offices, however, are eligible for verification.


Office buildings don't get a listing.

I was specifically looking for the interpretation of these lines. And especially this

Sales or leasing offices,

I looked around a lot to understand whether office buildings get a GMB listing but as you said, they usually do not... However as you noted each of these properties are separate business with distinct names so maybe I can set up the office buildings as "Office Space Rental Agency"?

If you get a time, please look at Regus Properties which has GMB listings for all of its properties in all the states it operates. (i.e. https://www.google.am/search?q=Regus+Properties+Los+Angeles)

Thanks again for your time.

 

[James Watt]

Regus is a very different entity than what you're talking about, right? People do look up Regus directly, by name looking for virtual offices and a range of other services. With most office buildings though, unless it was a city landmark, I can't imagine them qualifying for a listing. This is outside my main area of expertise though. I gave you my opinion, but if you want a second one, Linda or Joy or Colan or someone else that knows better will need to chime in.

A bigger question, what do you hope to gain by it? Commercial real estate isn't sold from the 3-pack as far as I know. If there's no ROI for the client, why waste your time on a gray area?

 

[gulliver]

Agree. Regus probably was a bad example but the client wants visibility, as Regus gets for office space. Not sure about ROI for the client to be honest as it's requested and at this moment I'm trying to figure out if this is the right thing to do or not and advise them accordingly.

Thanks for the input. I'll wait to see if someone else can comment on this and so far I'm more inclined to advise against opening GMBs.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I agree with James.

But additionally I see this almost like home builders that have a subdivision with homes to sell. Or model homes. They only qualify for a listing if it's staffed full-time at that location.

So if each office has a staffed rental office onsite (like an apartment would) they could have a listing. But if the office building is just offices and any contact is made via the PM's location, then they only qualify for the PM listing. That's my take on it anyway.

I think Regus is also different in that they do have staff onsite. (The receptionist) If you walk in and have questions there is a real person on staff you can talk to that can give you a rate sheet, etc.

 

[gulliver]

Thanks Linda. So it essentially comes down to having staffed rental office for each of this properties/buildings at the same location?

I'm not trying to find a loophole in the rules , just to get if I can do this right with full understanding of what I'm doing and at the same time, help the client.

Thanks.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi G,

Yes, the quote from the guidelines James shared tells the tale. Does not spell out "staffed during their business hours" but we know that's a requirement.