Most commercial real estate rebrands are interchangeable. The same sans-serif logo, the same lifestyle photography in the lobby, the same promise of “elevated amenities.” Cover the address and the brand could belong to almost any building in any market.
Why Every Commercial Real Estate Rebrand Looks the Same With David Kessler (Transcript)
I have watched this pattern play out across Chicagoland for the past decade, and it is getting worse. On a recent episode of The Real Finds Podcast, David Kessler, founder and CEO of the New York brand and creative agency Starfish, explained why. His answer should concern any owner who recently paid for a repositioning.
The Same Agencies Produce the Same Brands
David’s diagnosis is direct. Many owners hire agencies that work exclusively in real estate and have followed the same playbook for twenty years. The result is a retread: familiar strategy with new adjectives.
His remedy is to borrow from other industries. By David’s account, real estate is a meaningful share of Starfish’s business, alongside healthcare, consumer brands, electronics, and music. Broader inputs produce sharper thinking.
Starfish entered the sector when Vornado approached the agency about its holdings around Penn Station. That work contributed to what Vornado now markets as THE PENN DISTRICT, a $2.5 billion revitalization that the company says includes more than five million square feet of redeveloped Class A office space and 1.1 million square feet of new retail. When the pandemic emptied Manhattan, every owner suddenly needed a compelling reason for tenants to choose their building over the one across the street.
The same dynamic exists here. When much of the suburban office inventory is competing for the same tenants, “Class A with amenities” is not a differentiator. It is the baseline.
The Hand-Over-the-Logo Test
The most practical idea from our conversation is a simple test. Cover the logo on your marketing materials and ask whether a competing building could say exactly the same thing. If it could, you do not have a brand. You have a brochure.
David builds every brand from three inputs:
- Internal identity. The genuine character of the company or property, rather than what management assumes tenants want to hear.
- Customer needs. Both the stated needs and the ones tenants rarely articulate.
- Competitive uniqueness. Territory that no competitor can credibly claim.
His best-known example is Dunkin’. David describes working on the coffee positioning behind “America Runs on Dunkin’,” the tagline developed by Hill Holliday and launched in 2006. He recalls visiting roughly a hundred locations and finding that the business ran on coffee, not donuts. Customers were deeply loyal to it, and the reason was consistency, delivered in part by machines that dispense precise amounts of cream and sugar. The positioning was true to the company, met a real customer need, and was something Starbucks could not claim. As a regular Dunkin’ customer myself, I can attest that it worked.
Buildings Should Reinvent Themselves Like Fashion Brands
David argues that the most enduring brands are fashion houses, because they reinvent themselves continually. Buildings face the same challenge: they will stand for a century whether or not their brand keeps pace.
For the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s only New York work, he says the process began with understanding the original architect’s intent. At Moynihan Train Hall, the objective was to turn a space people rush through into one where they choose to spend time.
Return to Office: Recruit, Don’t Mandate
A firm like JPMorgan can require employees to be in the office five days a week. Most companies do not have that leverage. In David’s view, many financial firms framed return to office as a take-it-or-leave-it policy and paid for it in turnover.
The more effective approach is to inspire rather than require, and that is where landlords earn their rent. David compares the strongest amenity-driven buildings to the “third place” concept on which Starbucks built its brand: a destination between home and work where people want to be. Fitness, food, and social space all contribute. He also believes younger workers increasingly recognize the cost of remote isolation.
We have examined this from the owner’s perspective, including how office employees now evaluate space like consumers and why landlords are looking beyond badge swipe data to understand how their buildings are actually used.
On attendance, across the 100 to 130 transactions the Van Vlissingen and Co. team completes each year, most occupiers settle at three and a half to four days per week. Regulated industries are typically at five, and some firms remain at one or two. Starfish itself is in the office Tuesday through Thursday. Hybrid work is here to stay.
Family Office Rebrands Require Full Buy-In
Many of our clients are family offices and multigenerational owners, so I asked David how those rebrands should be approached. His first step is to determine whether the project involves the family’s master brand or an individual property, because they are fundamentally different undertakings.
The second step is alignment. The impetus usually comes from a younger generation, but if the person championing the change lacks the authority to approve it, the effort becomes expensive and futile. And because families often have deep emotional attachment to a long-standing name, a successful rebrand requires a deliberate communications plan explaining what has changed and why.
AI Is Flattening Real Estate Brands
This was the most consequential part of the discussion. David notes that brands are now interpreted by AI systems, not just people. Citing figures he heard at a Gartner conference, he says a majority of B2B searches now run through AI. Decision makers evaluating your building may well be asking a chatbot first.
AI does not simply repeat your website. It draws on many sources and assembles a neutral summary. A generic brand gets averaged into invisibility.
His prescription is to build an authentic, differentiated brand and express it consistently across every channel: website, marketing materials, social media, review sites, and published content. AI can certainly help produce that content, but only when it is directed by a defined point of view. Without one, the result is AI slop, and the market is already noticing. This year, two or three clients told us that generic AI output in a competing firm’s pitch influenced their decision.
Will AI Replace Brokers?
Looking ten years ahead, David expects AI agents to become common throughout commerce, including marketplaces where buildings list space directly. Whether that displaces brokers, he says, depends on the value brokers establish for themselves. His expectation is that personalized service will continue to prevail.
I agree. Our team already uses AI agents for repetitive back-office work, but understanding a client’s business and representing it well still requires a person.
When I asked what the industry is missing, David answered in two words: authenticity and soul.
If your building’s story cannot hold up both on a tenant tour and in an AI summary, that is ultimately a leasing problem, not a marketing problem. Before repositioning, review current Chicago office market conditions, then speak with our brokerage, management, and development team. You can hear the full conversation with David on The Real Finds Podcast.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.