Construction and property sectors could be the perfect verticle for your MSP, today we look at what makes them so attractive. Also this week, how to market your MSP if you’re a one-person band, and the psychology of why your clients are so susceptible to cyber criminals… and what to do about it.

Welcome to Episode 365 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

A deep dive into winning construction and property clients

Let’s start by going deep on two sectors that do often get grouped together a lot and yet they actually have different buying psychology. We’re talking construction and property, or of course if you’re in the US, we’re talking real estate. We’re going to look at both, what makes them attractive, what makes them difficult sometimes, and how you need to adapt your marketing for each one.

Let’s start with why construction is such an attractive vertical. So construction is massive and it’s chronically underserved by IT. If you go out and do a lot of research, you’ll get your AI friend to do some research for you, 92% of construction firms have reported difficulty filling open positions in 2025. And the productivity in that sector has grown literally just a couple of percent over the last couple of decades, so it’s a very flat sector. Around 45% of construction organisations have no AI implementation at all. And most of them are years behind other industries in just basic technology adoption.

The combination of a huge sector, chronic understaffing and poor technology maturity, for some MSPs, that’s exactly the kind of thing that piques your interest.

And I’m including the entire construction supply chain here, not just talking about the main contractors, but also subcontractors, architects, structural engineers, civil engineers, all of the specialist trades. They might have different names in your marketplace, but they all pretty much do the same thing. And they all share very similar underlying technology pressures even though they’re all doing different jobs in a construction project, which is pretty exciting.

If we look at the specific pain points in construction, their single biggest issue is distributed sites. Because a construction firm isn’t just one office with some people sitting in that office, it’s likely to be a head office, multiple active job sites, all of which have got different connectivity and different access needs. And then there’s different people coming and going constantly and there’s lots and lots of contractors. So there’s different people coming in all the time, going around different sites. It’s actually very complex, especially for a bigger business. So getting secure, reliable access to project data consistently across all of that complexity, well, that’s pretty difficult. And often they’re attempting to do that without dedicated IT support, without a genius like you helping them.

You could add into that then workforce churn because construction teams expand and contract with project cycles. So they’re constantly onboarding and offboarding users and they’re managing who has access to what. It’s a never ending thing, I would imagine. I don’t know. I don’t work with construction people, but you can imagine that amount of in and out and change and contraction stress, it just creates a lot of IT work. And that’s a good thing for you because without proper process, that’s creating huge gaps for them. I mean, software wise there’s gaps. Security wise, there’s definitely gaps if you look at that.

Let’s go back to software. Construction firms from our research do rely on specialist tools. They have project management platforms, they have estimating software, of course, they’ve got building information, modeling systems, ERP integrations, CAD tools, all of that kind of stuff. And your a...