Production

August 2026 · 7 min read

Commercial real estate flyer design: what belongs in one.

The leasing flyer is the most-forwarded document in commercial real estate and, usually, the worst-designed. Most are a template with a phone photo, a demographics table nobody sourced, and three logos fighting for the corner. Here is how we build one that tenant reps actually open twice, page by page.

The anatomy, page by page

We recently produced a seven-page flyer for a 2,660 SF corner suite in Buena Park (the full case study is here). The structure generalizes to almost any leasing assignment:

• Cover. One strong photograph, the address, the deal line (size, lease type, availability), and every firm on the listing. Skip the collage; a cover with six photos sells none of them.
• The space. Facts in a scannable table: size, dimensions, lease type, rate, availability. If the rate is on request, say so plainly.
• Plans. The floor plan and site plan, each at a size a person can read. If the architect's sheet is rotated, rotate it back. A sideways plan on page three tells the reader how much care went into the rest.
• Location. An annotated aerial beats a generic map pin: label the site, the anchors, the cross streets, and put the traffic counts directly on the roads they belong to.
• Market data. Demographics and traffic in clean tables, each with its source and year printed under it. Numbers without sources read as decoration.
• Contact. Every listing broker with a direct line and email. On co-listed deals, both firms get equal billing everywhere: never "Firm A with Firm B."

One design system, site and flyer

A flyer should not look like it came from a different company than the listing website. Same typefaces, same palette, same table styles. When the PDF and the page read as one campaign, the whole listing feels managed; when they clash, prospects notice even if they cannot say why. We cut the flyer from the same design system as the site it links back to.

The flyer's real job is to make someone click through to a page you control. Design it as a door, not a destination.

The technical traps nobody warns you about

Two production details separate a flyer people read from one they close:

• Image resolution. Exported carelessly, a PDF embeds every image at full camera resolution. The file balloons and every page decodes tens of megapixels while the reader scrolls. Downsample to roughly 150 DPI at print size; nobody can tell, and the file drops by half.
• Transparency. Layered design elements, soft shadows, and translucent labels render fine in Apple's Preview and then stutter badly in Chrome's PDF viewer, which is where most recipients will open it. For the version you email, flatten each page to a single image. It scrolls like silk everywhere. Keep a layered version for print, where selectable text and vector sharpness matter.

We learned both the honest way, watching a beautiful flyer lag in the one viewer most people use.

Print file, web file

They are different deliverables. The web file is flattened, compressed, and lives at a stable URL on the listing site, so it updates without re-emailing anyone and every send points at the newest version. The print file keeps vectors and selectable text at full quality. If a vendor hands you one file for both jobs, it is doing one of them badly.

What a flyer should cost

As a standalone service, professionally designed flyers run a few hundred dollars to low four figures depending on pages and photography. We rarely sell them standalone: the flyer falls out of the listing-site build almost for free, because the design system, media, and data already exist. That bundling is most of why our single-property projects are quoted flat: the second deliverable costs the client almost nothing extra.

See a finished example: the actual Lincoln flyer (PDF).