Martin Brady (left), executive vice president for sales and leasing with The Marketing Directors, and Jacqueline Urgo, the firm’s president, are pictured at the Cafe at Journal Squared in Jersey City. — Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
By Joshua Burd
“Here’s the kitchen” is not a phrase you’ll hear during a tour led by The Marketing Directors, the residential development advisory firm. Not if Jackie Urgo has anything to say about it.
“It’s not that,” said Urgo, the firm’s president, explaining the ongoing, intensive training that its agents go through when they’re leasing or selling a client’s building.
“It is ‘Here’s why the kitchen is the best kitchen you’ve seen’ — and the reasons why.”
There’s no doubt that details matter, especially in the hyper-competitive world of high-end residential real estate. The Marketing Directors has proven that in New York City, where it was founded in 1980, and in New Jersey, where it has spent the last three decades as a central player in the luxury apartment boom. That has made it all but ubiquitous in Jersey City and the state’s other top markets, thanks to not only its flagship sales and leasing services but the critical research and consulting it provides to builders during site acquisition, design and other phases.
“Yes, we’ve been doing this for decades, but we want our answers to be based on real fact,” Urgo said. “And that’s what our research department is able to give us to make our product and our pricing decisions and to give developers a confidence level that they should go after that site.”
The Marketing Directors arrived in New Jersey in the mid-1990s when it was tapped to sell the landmark Port Liberte condominium project in Jersey City. Since then, it has leased more than 30,000 apartments across 123 rental properties in the Garden State, while selling another 5,400 homes in 34 condominium projects. Those totals include more than 25,000 rental or for-sale units in the last 10 years alone, and New Jersey currently accounts for 60 percent of its business, up from 45 percent historically.
With a team of about 70, the company has a client roster in New Jersey that includes the likes of Ironstate Development, KRE Group, Panepinto Properties and others, many of which have used its services for 25 years or more. Some 85 percent of its business comes from repeat clients, a fact that’s most evident in high-density markets like the Gold Coast, where it often works on multiple buildings in the same neighborhood or around the same train station.
That’s a good thing, according to Urgo and the firm’s Marty Brady, who cite Jersey City’s resurgent Journal Square neighborhood as an example. Among other high-profile assignments, the company has managed lease-up for KRE’s three-phase, 1,840-unit Journal Squared project that has come online over the past decade. It has done so for several other nearby buildings during that time, and its next major project will soon open just south of the Journal Square Transportation Center, where Kushner is developing the two-tower, 1,723-unit property known as The Journal.
“We love that we’re so concentrated in this area, because once we know about each building and how we’re going to brand it, it enables us, with such a concentration of product, to differentiate each brand and really be able to come up with a customized solution to make each one successful,” Urgo said. “Because the big question from developers today is: What are you going to do with all this inventory?”
Brady, an executive vice president for sales and leasing, added: “The competition is great, because two buildings bring three people to the neighborhood. And it just builds and builds.”
The firm, which focuses exclusively on new construction, has a long-established business model to ensure success at its clients’ buildings. That largely hinges on having in-house, W2 employees rather than brokers who are independent contractors, Urgo said, giving them the full support of management and giving management greater control over the process.
Equally critical is that each team member works on just one building at a time and can only garner their income from that property for the duration of the assignment. That means they can’t refer to another building and are truly incentivized to convert every prospect that visits the site. Couple that with The Marketing Directors’ rigorous training program, which begins before the team arrives for a new assignment and continues weekly.
“Whether they’ve been with us for one day or 15 years, they go through a training boot camp prior to being assigned any other job,” Urgo said. “They learn the speed of the elevators, the thickness of the glass … Our teams are armed with the knowledge of how to sell and build value with each feature that the developer spent money on to make their building better and different.”
She added that its agents typically stay on site until the property is fully leased, noting that “the last home is almost more important than the first home, because the profit is at the end for a developer.” Then comes “a smooth handover” to the client’s in-house management team, along with the opportunity for the owner to refinance and for its building to “have a reputation that they have a following and consistent prospect flow.”
Still, the firm’s services often begin years before a building hits the market or even years before a shovel hits the ground. It has an experienced research team that tracks sales and leasing activity in the region, as well as incentives, broker commissions, amenity fees and many other metrics, providing valuable insights that a developer can use when deciding whether to buy a site or evaluating a potential project.
The Marketing Directors then crafts recommendations for floorplans, unit mix, finishes and common areas that it feels would be appropriate for the building’s size and location. All of which becomes a sort of cheat sheet for the developer’s architect, initiating a process that continues through design and development.
“That product development part is very important,” Urgo said. “We don’t just throw developers’ money at the wall. We want to make sure that we highlight the most impactful points that a prospect comes in to see … (And) we design that product to fulfill the needs of that target market.”
Doing so can be challenging in an untested market, as Journal Square was a decade ago, but The Marketing Directors has shown that it can navigate that uncertainty. For the first phase of KRE Group’s pioneering Journal Squared project, for instance, the team not only found the appropriate price point relative to other more established sections of Jersey City, but took extra steps to attract renters to the lesser known neighborhood.
That meant offering somewhat larger apartments and “a plethora of amenities early on to drive people to this location,” Urgo said. “And then we were able to scale back a little on the size but upgrade the finish level” for subsequent phases, as momentum grew in the area.
“It’s really a well-thought-out plan to bring on 1,900 units in three buildings over a 10-year period — in the same location,” she added.
The success of the KRE project also reflects the growth and sustainability of Journal Square as a submarket, Urgo and Brady said. They noted that the first two Journal Squared buildings never went below 98 percent occupancy while they leased the 598-unit third phase.
“Even though some people move up to new, there’s no vacuum effect,” she said. “In Journal Squared, you’re not emptying building one and building two to fill building three. There’s just new people coming into the marketplace and there’s no sign of it slowing down in any of the markets we’re in right now.”
Their team is seeing similar momentum in many other markets — from Bayonne, Harrison and other sections of Jersey City to the Jersey Shore and the Hudson Valley.
“There was a small period where we were in design-development for a lot of buildings because they were having trouble getting their financing, but that’s coming back,” Urgo said.
“It’s been a very good stretch,” Brady added. “And it’s a very, very busy stretch going into ’25, ’26 and ’27.”
