Real Estate Needs Better Stories Than Spreadsheets
Better storytelling in real estate doesn’t mean being cute or over‑romantic. It means articulating three things with discipline; concept, context, and consequences
Real estate doesn’t just build assets; it builds stories about what kinds of lives are possible inside them. For a long time, the industry could get away with pretending otherwise. If the pro forma worked, the rest would take care of itself. That world is gone.
Today, most projects don’t fail because the numbers are wrong. They fail because the narrative is. The underwriting is tight, the design is competent, the location checks outb-band yet the project lands with a dull thud in the market. Investors hesitate. Tenants don’t quite see it. The city shrugs. On paper, it’s fine. In culture, it’s invisible.
What’s interesting is that real estate already knows story matters. The language just shows up in different clothes: leasing momentum, tour activity, tenant mix, “buzz,” the way a project “shows” in IC memos and on investor calls. When CBRE talks about why property brands matter, they’re clear: a strong property brand differentiates assets in crowded markets, increases leasing activity, and drives value beyond the physical improvements themselves. Branding and storytelling, in other words, don’t sit on top of the asset. They shape how the asset exists in people’s heads.
But when you look at the average OM, brand, or launch deck, you see a pattern. The story breaks in the same places over and over again.
It starts with generic positioning. “Class A creative office.” “Luxury multifamily in the heart of [neighborhood].” “Prime retail with exceptional visibility.” These phrases are safe. They’re also interchangeable. They tell you nothing about why this building deserves to exist, for whom, and why now. In a world where every property has a glossy brochure and a decent website, sameness is a quiet form of risk: if you can’t tell projects apart, it’s easier to say no.
Then there’s the problem of audience. Most materials are written as if they need to convince everyone at once: tenants, investors, lenders, partners, the city, sometimes even internal teams. The result is a kind of narrative beige—sentences that mean different things to each group and resonate deeply with none. Yet the evidence is clear: people make decisions faster and with more confidence when they feel a specific, relevant story is being told to them, not past them.
The third fracture is inconsistency. A firm’s brand says one thing, the property website another, the OM a third, the leasing collateral a fourth. None are terrible; they just don’t agree. Investors and tenants may not consciously clock the disconnect, but they feel it. A strong, coherent brand identity in development and rental markets has been shown to build trust, support stronger demand, and anchor a premium over time. A fragmented one does the opposite. It leaks authority.
When you zoom out, a pattern emerges. Real estate doesn’t have a “design problem.” It has a signal problem.
Every touchpoint - brand, OM, deck, site, tour script - is a signal. Together, those signals tell the market: this is a disciplined team, or a scattered one. This is a clear thesis, or a fuzzy bet. This is a place designed for people like you, or a commodity product that happens to be available. The numbers live inside that signal field. They are interpreted through it.
So what does a better story actually look like in this context?
It’s not a clever tagline or a more poetic project name. It’s a change in how you frame the asset in three dimensions: concept, context, and consequence.
Concept is the core. What is this place for? Who is it for? What rituals, behaviors, and identities does it make room for that other assets don’t? A strong concept is specific and asymmetrical. It includes the people you are willing to lose, not just the ones you want to attract. The projects that lease faster and hold value longer tend to have an idea at the center that tenants and investors can repeat in one sentence, in their own words.
Context is the second layer. How does this asset sit inside a neighborhood, a portfolio, a thesis? Why here, and why at this moment in the market cycle? Property branding work that outperforms doesn’t just describe amenities; it positions the project inside a larger pattern - of migration, of work, of retail, of culture. It makes the asset feel inevitable, not optional.
Consequence is the third. What happens if this project exists - and what happens if it doesn’t? For capital, that often means sharpening both upside and de-risking: making it clear how this asset will attract and retain the right demand, how it will show up in a portfolio, how it will behave in different conditions. For tenants and communities, it means being explicit about the change in daily life: what it feels like to enter the lobby, to work there, to live there, to walk past it at night.
When those three layers are aligned, something simple but rare happens: the materials stop fighting the deal. The OM stops reading like a compliance document and starts reading like a financial instrument with a clear thesis. The deck stops apologizing for the asset and starts inviting people into a vision. The website stops being a placeholder and becomes a proof point. The building hasn’t moved. The story around it has.
This isn’t about making every project “cool.” Some assets are meant to be quiet, reliable, almost invisible. Storytelling still matters there - because investors in “boring” product are buying stability, predictability, an absence of drama. The brand and narrative need to convey that just as clearly as a different project might need to convey edge or ambition.
The deeper truth is that AI and commoditized marketing tools have made it easier than ever to generate decent copy, decent logos, decent decks. That raises the bar for what counts as signal. Attention, trust, and conviction will increasingly flow to projects and firms that can articulate why they exist in a way that generic outputs can’t touch. The spreadsheet will always matter. But the story around it is becoming the differentiator.
Real estate doesn’t just need better spreadsheets. It needs better stories - stories that are as disciplined and intentional as the underwriting, and that recognize brand, narrative, and design for what they really are: not decorative skin, but the architecture of how the market understands what you’re building.
