Community Leader Spotlight
Featuring Holladay Properties Senior Marketing Director Jillian Koeneman
Tell us about your professional journey and how you landed at Holladay Properties.
After I graduated from Michigan State, I had a variety of marketing roles—I owned my own agency, I was involved in franchising, and I had clients in the commercial real estate space. When the opportunity at Holladay became available, I knew it would be a good fit, based on my entrepreneurial background and experience with commercial real estate. It was a fun journey and it’s been amazing to be here (at Holladay)!
How would you compare having your own marketing agency to being an in-house corporate marketer?
I think people who work for agencies are super brave, willing to put up with the clients and their crazy whims! I feel like the agency side is a wilder ride. I do like the corporate lifestyle because it feels a little calmer than an agency environment, where you have multiple clients. In a corporate environment, the culture is usually based on a set of expectations; and within that, you’re trying to improve things as well as try new things.
How would you describe the role that marketing has played in Holladay’s success, and how has your marketing changed or evolved?
Part of my job is marketing Holladay as a whole, as a brand and as a trusted real estate partner; the other side is helping each project be successful, be it an apartment community or a hotel. So, there’s telling the Holladay story and gaining new clients and investors; and then there’s the more business-to-consumer effort of getting people to lease apartments or book a hotel room. Those two related-but-unique efforts have really been refined in recent years.
One thing that has changed a lot is velocity. The velocity of our projects, as well as how fast customers want answers. But at the core, marketing is still the same—it’s about communication and building relationships, and under-promising and overdelivering to exceed customer expectations. That’s the part of marketing that will never change. It’s just the tools, tactics and technology that change rapidly.
What new things are on the horizon for Holladay?
We’re venturing into some new areas, including more adaptive reuse projects. For example, turning an office building into apartments, or looking at existing buildings that are underutilized or could be turned into more desirable things. We still do a lot of ground-up new construction, but how can we take what’s existing and make it shine? Perhaps it’s vacant, perhaps it was an office building that we turned into self-storage. That’s about being creative with existing real estate vs. starting over and building something new. We’re also doing some cool projects in Nashville, Tennessee and Richmond, Virginia, including event venues and other things new to Holladay, so that’s been fun. We’re also passionate about increasing housing in South Bend, and we’re really excited about Five Corners, a multi-family community across from Trader Joe’s that will include condos, apartments and retail. That should be completed in 2025.
What has surprised you in your role?
I never really had considered how quickly the appetite for different real estate classes can change. For example, multifamily could be all the rage, the “hot” thing. And then it could be nine months later and then the “hot” thing is self-storage or industrial. Investor trends change very quickly, based on how much inventory is in the market, bank rates, construction, and pricing. It’s just amazing to me how things like that can turn on a dime. Real estate projects take a long time, and what’s “hot” when you start might be more “not” midway through the project. So, it’s a little challenging to pivot quickly between real estate classes.
How do you spend your time when you’re not working?
We (my husband and I) really enjoy boating and being on the water at our cottage in Michigan as much as we can. Of course, my fur baby, a Goldendoodle, goes with us everywhere. And he’s obsessed with the boat! We operate a family farm and some other businesses, so spare time is rare for us, but we try to have fun no matter what we’re doing.