The Agency That Learned to Read a Building

A building is a peculiar product. It cannot be slipped into a tote bag, sampled for seven days, or returned because the blue looked different online. It sits where it sits. Its customers may be tenants, investors, neighbors, shoppers, city officials, reporters - sometimes all of them before lunch. And it arrives wrapped in a language that can make an intelligent person suddenly feel underqualified: entitlement, repositioning, placemaking, floor plate, net zero.

Nickerson built a communications business in that translation gap. The Boston agency does the recognizable agency things - public relations, brand strategy, websites, social campaigns, events and crisis work. Its difference is the object under examination. Nickerson understands the world that produces buildings and the technology now being wired into them. It knows that a leasing story is also a neighborhood story; that a proptech product must win trust from an industry famous for taking the long view; and that a crisis statement is useless if the people answering phones do not know what comes next.

The detour that stuck

Lisa Nickerson started the firm in 2003 after working at Codman & Co., a Boston commercial-real-estate brokerage later absorbed into Newmark. She thought she might eventually go back to real estate. Then the agency offered something the old path could not: flexibility while she raised three young children. The temporary-looking move became the durable one.

That origin explains more than a founding date. Many agencies approach a property as an assignment to decorate with messages. Nickerson approaches it as a working system. Who owns it? Who needs to lease it? What changed in the surrounding streets? Which community has standing to object? Which claim will survive a reporter's second question? The campaign comes after the map.

What the work actually looks like

Consider 1407 Broadway, a Shorenstein office building in Manhattan. The assignment was not merely to announce available square feet. Nickerson worked with CBRE and SRS Real Estate Partners on rebranding, repositioning and communications, then used social media to sell the neighborhood as a lifestyle and the building as an address for an emerging technology market. The output included a visual identity, marketing material, a property book and public coverage. The idea was simple enough to copy: prospects do not lease area. They lease a picture of their company in a place.

For Housing Families, the problem ran in the other direction. The nonprofit had expanded its services and communities during the pandemic, but its brand had not caught up. Nickerson reviewed how the identity would need to work over the coming decade, then joined brand, marketing and communications into one system. This is less cinematic than a launch party. It is also the kind of work that stops growth from turning an organization into a pile of mismatched explanations.

Infinityy offers the most revealing case. The property-technology platform, formerly called place.net, lets buyers and renters explore property material together in a virtual room. Nickerson handled branding, messaging, marketing, PR and business development through its early growth. Then the relationship changed shape: in 2026, Lisa Nickerson became Infinityy's CEO after serving as its part-time chief marketing officer. She handed day-to-day agency operations to senior leaders Molly Silvia, Shannon Mulaire and Joseph Soto. The agency's niche had become an operating credential.

The first product in a crisis is coordination

The cleanest evidence of Nickerson's practical streak came during the Columbia Gas emergency in Massachusetts. Thousands of homes were affected by overpressurized natural-gas lines. The restoration effort involved replacing 47 miles of pipeline and appliances or furnaces in more than 8,000 homes. This was not a moment for a clever tagline.

Nickerson and Columbia Gas assembled a dedicated social-media and intelligence operation with assigned roles and daily tasks. Facebook and Twitter became public-information desks. The team monitored government, public and private channels; issued a detailed report each day; attended community events; and published in English and Spanish. Video updates sometimes produced engagement 300 times higher than other public-announcement posts. PR Daily gave the work its crisis communication and reputation management award.

“The best crisis strategy is the one you never have to scramble to build.”Nickerson's crisis-preparedness principle

What failed first in that emergency was the ordinary assumption that information could move in one direction. People did not simply need an official statement; they needed reopening times, service details and answers in the channels they were already using. The useful unit of crisis communication turned out to be a loop: listen, clarify, publish, watch the response, repeat.

A broad menu with a narrow spine

Nickerson calls itself full-service, a phrase that can make every agency sound like every other agency. Here it is more coherent than it first appears. Real-estate projects routinely need identity, web design, public relations, community engagement, leasing collateral, events and reputation management at the same time. Buying those disciplines separately creates handoffs. Nickerson sells integrated projects and ongoing client relationships, with a fractional CMO offer for organizations that want senior strategy without a permanent executive appointment. Fees are negotiated rather than posted.

Its customers include owners and developers, architecture and construction firms, hospitality groups, nonprofits and technology companies. Public work names Simon Property Group, Sasaki, Hines, Shorenstein, Bulfinch, WiredScore and CREtech. The newer edge is climate and energy technology, where technical performance has to become a story comprehensible to investors, occupants and real-estate operators without dissolving into green adjectives.

The sequence is the strategy

1. 2003Real estate becomes an agency

   Lisa Nickerson launches the firm after working in commercial property brokerage.

2. 2019Crisis operations become visible

   The Columbia Gas response earns national recognition for a bilingual, high-frequency information program.

3. 2023The founder becomes the story

   PRNEWS recognizes Nickerson as a Business Entrepreneur in its Top Women awards.

4. 2025The agency joins the Elite 120

   PRNEWS selects Nickerson for its 2026 national agency list.

5. 2026The loop closes

   Nickerson takes the CEO role at Infinityy while the agency's senior leaders take daily command.

The approach is less useful when a buyer wants a cheap, isolated deliverable, has no access to decision-makers, or expects publicity to repair a weak product. Integrated work needs access, time and a client willing to let the agency understand the business behind the brief. Without that, context becomes expensive overhead.

Nickerson's most portable lesson is therefore not about real estate at all. It is about the advantage of knowing what a thing means before trying to make it famous. Buildings make that principle easy to see because they are so large, stubborn and public. But nearly every company has its own floor plates and load-bearing walls. The good communicator learns where they are.