The Lease-Up Playbook: What a Fractional CMO Actually Does From Day One
Lease-up is where everything gets real. The permits are pulled. The steel is rising. And somewhere between the renderings on your website and 95% occupancy, there's a massive, complicated marketing operation that has to run flawlessly, on deadline and on budget.
Most real estate developers face the same uncomfortable question at this stage: you need serious marketing firepower, but you're not ready (or able) to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer at a $250,000+ salary. And handing the whole thing off to an agency means losing strategic control at exactly the moment you need it most.
That's the gap a fractional CMO fills. Not a consultant who writes a deck and disappears. Not an agency exec billing by the hour. A seasoned marketing leader who plugs directly into your project team, owns the strategy and drives the outcome…fractionally.
Here's what that actually looks like during a lease-up, broken into the phases every development goes through.
Phase 1: Pre-Launch — Building the Foundation (12–18 Months Out)
Before a single rendering hits the web, a fractional CMO is already working. This phase is about getting the fundamentals right, because everything that comes later is built on top of them.
The work here includes market and competitive research, confirming target tenant personas, and translating what the developer built into a brand story the market actually cares about. It's the difference between 'Class A mixed-use development' and a name, identity, and voice that people remember and want to be part of.
Specific deliverables in this phase typically include:
Brand strategy and positioning platform
Project naming (one of the highest-leverage, most underestimated decisions in development marketing)
Visual identity and brand guidelines
Messaging architecture, taglines, value propositions, tone of voice
Go-to-market plan with budget framework
Agency selection and scope-of-work negotiation
The fractional CMO isn't just approving work, they're setting the creative direction, managing the agency relationships and making sure every decision maps back to the leasing goal.
Phase 2: Pre-Leasing — Building Demand Before You Open
The hardest thing to do in real estate marketing is create urgency around something that doesn't exist yet. Pre-leasing is the art of making the future feel inevitable and desirable and doing it in a window when you have the least to show.
A fractional CMO leads the development and launch of the project's digital presence: website, social channels, email capture and any broker or community outreach programs. They're setting the KPIs, building the analytics infrastructure and making sure every dollar spent in this phase is traceable to pipeline.
This phase also includes broker education and relationship management, critical for office and retail lease-ups, and increasingly important in multifamily as well. Your fractional CMO builds the story for your broker deck, trains the leasing team on the brand and makes sure the market knows you're coming before you're ready to sign a lease.
Phase 3: Active Lease-Up — Driving Velocity
Once the doors open, the strategy has to perform. This is where the fractional CMO shifts from builder to operator — monitoring traffic, tour rates, conversion data and cost-per-lease in real time and adjusting the playbook accordingly.
What's happening behind the scenes during active lease-up:
Weekly campaign performance reviews, cutting what isn't working, doubling down on what is
Content creation oversight; photography, video, social, email cadences
Leasing gallery experience; making sure the physical space tells the same story as digital one
Event strategy: broker happy hours, community activations, hard-hat tours
PR and earned media outreach
Reputation management as early residents begin leaving reviews
The fractional CMO is also the connector between the developer, the leasing team and any agencies or vendors — making sure nobody is working in a silo and that the leasing velocity target stays front and center.
Phase 4: Stabilization — Setting the Property Up for Long-Term Success
Lease-up doesn't end at 95% occupancy. The final phase is about retention, reputation and transition, making sure the brand you built holds its value.
A fractional CMO wraps up the engagement by documenting the brand and marketing playbook for the property management team, analyzing what worked (and what to do differently next time), and in some cases, transitioning the project to an in-house team or ongoing agency retainer.
This handoff is one of the most overlooked parts of the lease-up process and one of the most valuable. A well-documented brand is a durable asset that protects your NOI long after the fractional engagement ends.
The Bottom Line: What You're Actually Getting
A fractional CMO during lease-up is not a luxury for well-capitalized institutional developers. It's a precision tool for any developer who wants to hit their absorption targets without burning through agency fees on strategy work that should have already been done.
"The fractional model works because lease-up marketing is fundamentally a leadership problem, not a production problem. You don't need more deliverables, you need someone accountable for the outcome."
At Fresh Powder Consulting, we've done this across office towers, multifamily high-rises, mixed-use districts, and master-planned communities in CBDs from coast to coast. We plug in, we own the strategy and we don't leave until the job is done.
Ready to talk about your next lease-up?
Every project is different. Let's figure out whether a fractional CMO is the right fit for yours — and what that engagement would actually look like.