The CRE Developer’s Guide to Pre-Leasing with Digital Marketing

How to build a qualified lease-up pipeline before your project delivers and why the best developments start marketing at groundbreaking, not move-in.

There’s a window of time between when a CRE project breaks ground and when it delivers that most developers treat as a waiting room. Permits are filed, construction crews are mobilized, and the leasing strategy gets scheduled for “six months out.”

That window is a missed opportunity.

The developments that achieve stabilization fastest and at the strongest rents aren’t doing something fundamentally different at lease-up. They’re doing something fundamentally different eighteen months before it. They’re running digital marketing campaigns while the foundation is being poured, building waitlists while the steel is going up, and converting leads into signed leases before a unit or bay has a certificate of occupancy.

This guide covers how to do exactly that with a digital marketing strategy built around the pre-leasing timeline.

1.  Start Earlier Than You Think

The most common pre-leasing mistake is treating it as a launch problem rather than a pipeline problem. Developers wait until the project is close to delivery—interiors painted, amenities photographed, leasing office open—and then expect digital advertising to fill units on a 90-day clock.

That clock isn’t long enough.

For multifamily, the average prospect takes 30–90 days from initial search to signed lease. For retail tenants, the timeline is measured in quarters, not weeks. If your first digital impression happens at CO, you’ve already lost the lead nurture window.

Here’s how we typically map the pre-leasing timeline for our clients:

The specific timing shifts depending on project size, asset class, and market. But the principle holds: digital marketing is most effective when it has time to build an audience before it needs to convert one.

2.  Build the Digital Foundation First

Before any paid media runs, three things need to exist: a dedicated landing page, a lead capture mechanism, and an email nurture sequence. Everything else—social ads, search campaigns, influencer content—drives traffic to these. Without them, spend goes to waste.

The pre-leasing landing page

This is not your corporate website. It’s a project-specific page with one job: convert a visitor into a lead. For developments that aren’t ready to show a finished product, that means leading with the story, the neighborhood, the vision, the lifestyle, rather than the floor plans.

What a high-performing pre-leasing landing page includes:

• A compelling headline that speaks to the prospect’s aspiration, not the developer’s specs
• Renderings or concept imagery (professionally produced—this is worth the budget)
• A brief, specific project description: location, delivery date, unit mix or tenant category
• A single, clear CTA: “Join the priority list” or “Register for early access”
• A short form—name, email, and one qualifying question at most
• Mobile-optimized layout, since the majority of search traffic will arrive on a phone

What to leave off: lengthy development history, corporate boilerplate, and anything that requires a visitor to scroll past three screens before they find the form.

The waitlist and lead capture

The waitlist is the pre-leasing asset. Every lead that enters it is a prospective tenant who has self-qualified, they found the project, they were interested enough to submit their information, and they’ve given you permission to market to them. That’s fundamentally different from a cold list.

For multifamily, segment your waitlist by unit type from the start. Someone looking for a two-bedroom is not the same prospect as a studio renter, and your nurture content shouldn’t treat them the same way.

For retail, the “lead” looks different: it’s a prospective tenant’s broker, a regional brand’s real estate decision-maker, or a local operator exploring expansion. The form and the follow-up sequence should reflect that.

The email nurture sequence

Most pre-leasing leads don’t convert immediately. They’re interested, but they’re also twelve months away from needing to make a decision. The email sequence keeps the project top of mind across that gap.

A baseline sequence for a multifamily pre-lease might look like this:

• Email 1 (immediate): Welcome to the list, confirm their spot, set expectations for what’s coming
• Email 2 (week 2): Neighborhood story (walkability, amenities, what’s opening nearby)
• Email 3 (month 1): Construction update with a photo or short video from the site
• Email 4 (month 2): Meet the team, or introduce the amenity concept in more detail
• Email 5 (month 3+): Monthly construction updates, with a hard CTA as delivery approaches

The tone throughout should be conversational and specific. Generic “exciting updates” emails get ignored. Emails that say “the rooftop deck framing went up this week—here’s a photo” get opened.

3.  The Paid Media Strategy for Pre-Leasing

Once the foundation is in place, paid media accelerates the pipeline. For pre-leasing, two channels do the heavy lifting: paid social and paid search. They serve different roles and should be budgeted and managed accordingly.

Paid social (Meta / Instagram)

Paid social is the awareness and interest engine. It’s where you reach people who aren’t yet searching for an apartment or retail space, people who are in the right demographic, in the right geography, with the right behavioral signals, but haven’t yet entered an active search.

For multifamily pre-leasing, the most effective Meta audiences are:

• Geographic: radius around the project, with adjustment for drive-to-work patterns if the project is in a commuter market
• Demographic: age and income brackets aligned to the unit’s price point
• Behavioral: people who have shown interest in moving (recent activity on Zillow, Apartments.com, or related apps)
• Lookalike: modeled off your existing waitlist once it reaches sufficient size (typically 500+ contacts)

The creative format that consistently outperforms in pre-leasing is short-form video, either rendered walkthroughs of the unit or amenity concept, or site progress videos shot on a phone. Static images convert, but video builds the emotional connection that pre-leasing requires.

Paid search (Google Ads)

Paid search captures demand that already exists. Someone typing “luxury apartments downtown [city]” or “retail space for lease [neighborhood]” is in active consideration, the highest-intent traffic available.

The challenge in pre-leasing is that your project doesn’t have the SEO history or the ILS presence to rank organically. Paid search fills that gap immediately.

Priority search terms for a multifamily pre-lease campaign:

• Brand terms: project name, development address
• Category terms: unit type, apartments, city/neighborhood, price range, apartments near [landmark]. 
• Competitive terms: comparable properties in the submarket (with care)

Keep the landing page match tight. A prospect searching “2-bedroom apartments” should land on a page that leads with two-bedroom availability, not a general project overview.

Retargeting

Retargeting should run from day one. Anyone who visits the landing page and doesn’t convert is a warm lead, and a retargeting campaign across Meta and Google Display Network keeps the project in front of them as they continue their search.

Retargeting budgets don’t need to be large, the audience is relatively small. But the ROI is consistently the highest of any pre-leasing channel, because you’re reaching people who have already shown intent.

4.  Multifamily vs. Retail: What’s Different

The principles above apply to both asset classes, but the execution differs in important ways.

For mixed-use projects with both multifamily and retail components, run separate campaigns with separate creative, separate landing pages, and separate lead funnels. The residential prospect and the retail tenant prospect are different people making different decisions, and conflating the two in your marketing dilutes both messages.

5.  Measuring What’s Working

Pre-leasing campaigns are measurable. Developers who treat digital marketing as a black box are giving up the ability to optimize spend before it matters most in the 90 days before delivery.

The metrics that matter at each phase:

Awareness phase (12+ months out)

• Cost per landing page visit
• Waitlist growth rate week over week
• Email open rate on welcome sequence (benchmark: 40–60% for a warm pre-lease list)
• Social engagement rate (saves and shares > likes)

Lead generation phase (6–12 months out)

• Cost per lead (CPL) by channel—know which channel is delivering leads most efficiently
• Lead quality: are the units and price points they’re interested in matching your mix?
• Email click-through rate on nurture sequence
• Waitlist size relative to total unit count (target: 3–5x units available by 6 months out)

Conversion phase (0–6 months out)

• Tour request rate from waitlist
• Application rate from tours
• Cost per executed lease by channel
• Days on market per unit type

6.  What to Ask Your Agency

Most full-service digital agencies know how to run a campaign. Fewer know how to structure a pre-leasing campaign (specifically where the asset doesn’t yet exist, the audience is being built from scratch, and the conversion timeline spans twelve to eighteen months rather than a standard 30-day window). 

When evaluating a digital marketing partner for a pre-leasing engagement, ask:

• How do you structure campaigns for assets that aren’t delivered yet? What does the creative strategy look like at groundbreaking vs. six months out vs. 90 days from CO?
• How do you segment and nurture a waitlist over a 12–18-month timeline without losing list quality?
• What CRM do you recommend for pre-leasing lead management, and how does it integrate with your campaign tracking?
• How do you measure campaign success when there are no leases to count yet?
• What’s your experience with the specific market and submarket? Do you understand the competitive set?

The Bottom Line

Pre-leasing with digital marketing isn’t a new channel strategy. It’s a new relationship with the timeline. The developers who stabilize fastest and at the best rents aren’t running better campaigns—they’re running them earlier, more patiently, and with a clear understanding of what each phase of the campaign is supposed to accomplish.

Start at groundbreaking. Build the foundation before the budget. Treat the waitlist as the asset. And when the building delivers, let the pipeline close it.