Type your building's address into a browser and look at what comes up first. Is it a page you own, or a listing platform's page about your property, wrapped in someone else's branding, someone else's ads, and helpful links to your competitors down the street? For most commercial buildings the answer is the latter. The digital address of the asset belongs to somebody else, and the owner is effectively a tenant on it.
That is the core of domain strategy for property websites: own the address, do not rent a listing page. Listing platforms are useful distribution channels, but they are their asset, their rules, and their audience relationship. A dedicated domain, whether it is the street address or the building's name, is yours for the life of the asset, and unlike a listing, it compounds.
Renting versus owning
When your only web presence is a profile on someone else's platform, you inherit all of their weaknesses. You cannot control what appears next to your property. You cannot add pages, tell the building's story, or shape the sequence a prospect sees. Inquiries route through their system before they reach yours. And if you ever leave the platform, or the platform changes its model, your presence evaporates along with every link that ever pointed at it.
A dedicated domain flips each of those. Every brochure, sign, email signature, and broker blast points to an address you control. Search engines accumulate trust in the domain year over year, which is not something you can take with you from a rented profile. Inquiries land directly with your leasing team. And when the building trades, the domain, the site, and their accumulated history transfer with it, a small but genuine piece of the asset.
Choosing the right domain
Address-based, like 100mainstreet.com: obvious, memorable, and matched to how brokers actually refer to the building
Name-based, like thewexford.com: the right call for branded, historic, or repositioned properties
Keep it short, skip hyphens and abbreviations, and say it out loud before you buy it
Register the obvious variants and redirect them to the main domain
Address-based domains work because they match search behavior: brokers and tenants search the address, and a domain that mirrors the query is easy to find, easy to remember, and easy to relay over the phone. Name-based domains earn their keep when the building has a genuine identity, a repositioning campaign, a historic name, or a multi-building campus. When in doubt, register both and point one at the other. Domains are the cheapest insurance in your entire marketing budget.
The operational part nobody wants to own
Domains fail in boring ways. A registration lapses because it was billed to a former employee's credit card. A DNS record breaks during an email migration. A security certificate expires quietly and the site starts greeting prospects with a browser warning instead of a lobby shot. None of this is difficult work, but all of it needs a named owner, and in most ownership structures it has none.
With Floorplate, domain management is included: registration, renewals, DNS, and certificates are handled as part of the same managed service that runs the site itself. Your leasing team gets a professional address that simply works, at $150 per month billed annually with a $4,500 one-time setup, and nobody has to remember whose card the renewal is on.
The listing platforms will still be there, and you should absolutely keep using them for reach. But they should be pointing at your building's own home on the web, not standing in for it. Own the address. Rent the distribution.