Commercial Real Estate Blog

We received a lot of great suggestions over the past couple months, and have been hard at work incorporating these improvements into our commercial information exchanges. Grab a cup of coffee, and read over the changes below!

Meet the Listing Fixer!

Whether you’re an agent or company administrator, you likely spend a good deal of time making sure your listings are accurate, complete, and up-to-date. We’ve created a new tool to make this job much quicker and easier.

If you have listings that need attention, you’ll see a bright red message waiting for you when you log in to your CIE. Just click the “Fix This” link, and you’ll be taken to the new Listing Fixer. You’ll see the problem listings on the left; clicking each one will tell you exactly what’s wrong, displaying only the fields you need to change. This allows you to quickly move through the list minimizing clicking, scrolling and searching to find problems.

This tool is something no other listing service (commercial or residential) offers, and besides making your life easier, we think it will drastically improve commercial property data integrity.

Link to Social Media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Blogs

You can now link your CIE profile to your accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or to your blog. This also works for company profiles. We’ve seen a steady increase in usage of these sites by CRE professionals, and we’re planning more integration later this year. Here’s an example of a CIE member profile using the new Social Media links: http://www.cpix.net/agent/20353

Combined Search: Active, Expired & Withdrawn Listings, Comps, and Building/Land Records

There’s a lot of searchable data on your CIE, and we’re always working to make it easier for you to find exactly what you need. You can now perform all property-related searches on the same page: Active Listings, Expired/Withdrawn, Comparables, and Building/Land Records (for CIEs that have off-market property data). Here’s a before and after comparison.

A few changes to note:

• We moved the Address Lookup box to the top of the search page to make it easier to find. Use this when you want to find out everything we know about a particular address (current listings, price changes, sale/lease history, links to tax records, etc).
• The new page makes it easier to search for specialty types: investment property, auctions, distressed property & price reductions.
• We made it easier to post wants, save searches, and create property alerts. You’ll now see direct links to these options when you’re viewing search results.

Display your Listings Anywhere with a Listing Widget

The Listing Widget is a new tool that allows you to embed a few listings on any website or blog, just by pasting some JavaScript into the page. You can build your widget by logging in, then clicking through to the “Promote” page for any listing. For SiteLink users, the widget will link directly to listing presentations on your SiteLink, so this is a great way to drive eyeballs to your listings.

FREE Company Administrator Training

We currently offer free online training sessions 4 days a week. We’re adding a 5th day, specifically geared toward company administrators, who are always hard at work behind the scenes. Neal will be leading these sessions, which will give admins a broad overview of how to get the most out of the system as well as answer any specific questions they may have. These will be held every Tuesday, and we encourage you or your company’s admin to attend. Sign Up Now!

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools in a couple months.

We added two new Commercial Information Exchanges to the Catylist family this month!

My Florida Regional MLS Launches New Commercial Property Database

My Florida Regional MLS (a consortium of 13 REALTOR® boards) is Florida’s largest multiple listing service with approximately 30,000 subscribers. We were thrilled when they chose us to build a new online database specifically for their commercial members.

“We at MFCRE are proud to have been able to bring this new tool and service for commercial practitioners in our market area,” says Carlos A. Fuentes, MFRMLS President. “We are excited about the opportunities to promote commercial listings throughout the Catylist national network. A great start for 2010.”

The new CIE is live at: MFCRE.com and serves the Central and Southwest Florida regions, including Orlando and Sarasota.

Here’s some local press about the launch:
MCRE brings Commercial Property Database to Central Florida

New Online Commercial Real Estate Listing Service Launches in NE Wisconsin

The REALTORS® Association of Northeast Wisconsin (RANW) also chose Catylist to develop a Commercial Information Exchange for their market. The new Wisconsin Commercial Information Exchange (WCIE) made its debut on January 14th at: CIEWisconsin.com. WCIE allows members to market available commercial real estate properties for sale or lease throughout Northeast Wisconsin and other markets in the state including Green Bay, Fox Valley, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Calumet, Waupaca and Shawano.

Learn more about how a Commercial Information Exchange can benefit your local community.

A couple months ago, we integrated our commercial property search engine technology into the national website of Keller Williams Commercial. It’s been a great success and a big time-saver for KW’s 850 commercial agents who can now focus on closing deals rather than re-entering data or fighting with technology.

Read on for the full release…

Read More »

Despite the tough economic environment of 2009, we had a really good year here at Catylist. Here are a few highlights:

• We saw strong growth in CIE usage. 70,000 new commercial property listings were added to our database in 2009 – an increase of 23% over 2008 growth. Logins were up 8% this year.
• Our search engine optimization and syndication efforts started paying off this year. Listings on the Catylist network of CIEs saw a 49% increase in traffic over 2008. We added some major distribution points for member listings, including CommercialSource, AcreScout, and RE Journal.
• We greatly expanded our research tools, and improved data integrity. We’re tracking more property statistics now, and adding lots of tools to help administrators manage their local databases of properties and comparables. Our Las Vegas client was the first to put these to the test, building a research database with almost 200,000 Sale Comps & Building Records.
• We added several new Commercial Information Exchanges this year, covering areas including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New England. We’ll also be launching CIEs in Florida and Wisconsin this month.
• We’ve extended our relationships with several major associations via long-term renewals.
• We also expanded our CIE technology into the corporate world this year, building an international CIE for RE/MAX Commercial and integrating our property search engine into the Keller Williams Commercial national website.
• We created a Twitter account and contributed some posts to the #CRE community.
• We added Nancy McKellar to our team. She’s been doing a great job providing leadership and ideas to our CIE administrators around the country via regular webinars and a new online message board.
• We received hundreds of thoughtful suggestions, and added hundreds of great features to the software including a real-time Market Monitor that allows our users to track CIE activity relevant to them, integration with Google Earth, new Traffic Reports, and specialty searches for Auctions, Price Reductions, Distressed & Green Properties.
• We redesigned Catylist.com to better describe the products and services we’re known for.
• Finally, we shook hands with thousands of commercial professionals at various conferences, demonstrations, and events. We found the face-to-face interaction to be very motivating and hope to continue building great relationships this year!

Focusing on providing simple, useful, and affordable tools has served us well, and we want to thank the commercial real estate community for their support this year. We’re looking forward to a productive 2010 — we have a lot in the works and you’ll be hearing more about that soon.

Happy New Year from the folks at Catylist!

We’ve recently launched a new CIE for the country’s 8th Largest REALTOR® association. Welcome Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS® (PAR) to the Catylist family!

PAR is comprised of 30,000+ residential and commercial REALTOR® members and covers 47 local REALTOR® associations throughout the state of Pennsylvania. PAR’s new database provides Pennsylvania real estate professionals a place to search and share property listings, recent sale/lease comparables, view demographics and market statistics, access marketing tools, and network with others to put together deals. With the current economic strain, there couldn’t be a better time for professionals in the market to come together and find more efficient ways of doing business.

“This is a great tool for REALTORS®. REALTORS® can get a statewide view of the commercial market so they can better service clients”, says John Derham, chair of PAR’s Commercial, Industrial and Investment Committee and Senior Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield, Philadelphia.

Check out the new website here: parcie.com!

UPDATE – Here’s a related article: PAR launches Commercial Information Exchange.

Learn more about how a Commercial Information Exchange can benefit your local community.

Read on for the full press release…

Read More »

Congratulations to the Commercial Alliance Las Vegas (CALV) for successfully augmenting their commercial database with almost 200,000 additional records! This project has been in the works for months, and is part of a concerted effort to provide their members with the most accurate and comprehensive real estate data available.

The Process – Merge & Verify
We worked with CALV to identify and carefully merge records from multiple sources (county tax databases, assessor records, local research databases, etc) into their CIE. Going forward, CALV has partnered with a local research firm, the Restrepo Consulting Group. Restrepo will verify and maintain the data, while receiving quarterly infusions of the latest building/owner records and recent sale transactions.

The Result – Savings for Members
The result is an extremely cost-effective database of commercial property listings, sale/lease comparables, building and owner records available to CALV members. This is a perfect example of how much time and money a local commercial real estate community can save by coming together to pool information and resources!

“I would like to thank Catylist for making the import go off without a hitch. This was a huge undertaking and Catylist made the difficult look easy. My hat is off to your technical staff that used their magic fingers in this effort. I have had other local brokers tell me that Catylist is a much superior product than any of the other competing platforms available to the brokerage community. As for me, I have found Catylist is very robust and able to give me just the information I need in order to advise my clients properly and perhaps just as important, the system is intuitive and easy to “drive” for those just getting started and can grow as the broker becomes more familiar with all the tools as his/her disposal.” — Garry Cuff, CCIM, 2009 President CALV

UPDATE – Here’s a related article: Las Vegas Realtors Expand Commercial Real Estate Research Database.

We’re currently working with a couple of our other clients on similar research initiatives. Learn more about how to bring a comprehensive, affordable research database to your market!

Read on for the full press release…

Read More »

We rolled out a few pre-Thanksgiving features to Commercial IQ and our local Commercial Information Exchanges tonight.

New Specialty Searches

Commercial Real Estate is changing quickly these days, and we’ve added support for several highly requested searches:

• Search Property Auctions — View properties being sold by auction.
• Search Distressed Property — Find properties designated as “Distressed” (REO/Foreclosed).
• Search Price Reductions — Pull up sale or lease listings which have had their listing prices lowered in the past 30 days.
• Search Green Property — Locate LEED Certified properties.

You’ll find links to these on the search page, or by clicking the “Add Search Filter” box on the search page.

If you’re listing a property in one of the above categories, be sure to log in and mark it as such. You’ll find these options under the “Details” tab when editing your listing.

Here are a couple other features we rolled in, based on requests from many users like you:

“Copy Me” on Email — You can now check a box when sending an email and have a copy sent to your own inbox for future reference.

Listing Attachment Improvements — Previously, we’d limited users to 3 external links (usually to video sites like YouTube) per listing. They can now add as many as they want, and label each with a title.

Thanks!

Thanks again for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools in a couple months.

We’ll soon be on our way to sunny San Diego for the 2009 REALTOR® Conference & Expo, November 13th through the 16th.

Come kick things off at our reception:

Or swing by our booth at the expo:
Catylist Booth #3129 (in the Commercial Block)

There are great things happening at Catylist, whether you’re an association looking to grow your commercial membership or a broker looking for marketing tools and services to close more deals.

Did you know?

• Several Catylist CIEs are in the process of building comprehensive research databases, complete with off-market properties, sale and lease comps and listings.
• A Catylist CIE recently added hundreds of thousands of building records and comparables from a well-known data provider.
• Two Catylist CIEs have already made the Commercial IDX service available to their members.
• Dozens of Catylist CIEs are publishing listings on local and state EDC websites, gaining exposure for members’ listings and generating revenue for the associations.
• Many Catylist CIEs are maximizing listing exposure by syndicating their data on local newspaper and publication websites at no cost to the associations.
• Thousands of Catylist CIE members are taking advantage of our suite of integrated marketing tools to promote their listings and their companies, without additional data entry.
• Catylist offers a free email campaign service to help associations increase their commercial membership and build adoption for their CIE.
• Catylist offers FREE daily training for our products & services.
• Catylist recently added over a dozen new sites to it’s distribution network, driving more listing views and leads to members.

Come find out why we’re the #1 provider of CIE solutions to associations around the country!

Last year, we put together a commercial real estate news aggregator that combines stories from dozens of different sources around the Web. We’re always on the lookout for new sources of CRE news to add into the mix, and here are a few we’ve recently added:

• Retail Traffic’s Traffic Court Blog
• Globe Street’s Counter Culture Blog
• Urban Land Institute’s The Ground Floor Blog
• Square Feet
• Robert Knakal’s StreetWise Blog

Are there other commercial real estate news sources you like? Leave a comment and let us know!

We’re excited to roll out another round of improvements tonight! These changes are now live on all of our Commercial Information Exchanges around the country, and on Commercial IQ (our national commercial real estate search engine).

New and Improved Listing Traffic Reporting

One of the most useful features of our CIEs is the ability to enter a listing once, then distribute it automatically to dozens of websites. By clicking on the “Track” link for any of your listing presentations, we allow you to monitor how many people have viewed it, and which site they viewed it on. We’ve overhauled this section to make it easier to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts:

• New Design — The new layout, addition of logos for each website, and improved charts better emphasize the important information, making the traffic data easier to read and understand.
• Greater Consistency — You can export this data into a marketing report for your reference, or to give to your client. The improved “Track” web page and the PDF report format are much more consistent, displaying the same information.
• More Date Options — We’ve added the ability to toggle between 4 date ranges: 30 days, 90 days, 1 Year, and All Time. These ranges affect both the “Track” page and the corresponding PDF reports.
• Access for Admins — Your company administrator can now access this section to monitor traffic received by any or all property listings for your company. This will make it easier to track the effectiveness of tools like SiteLink.

Upload Multiple Photos Simultaneously

Users can now upload multiple photos at the same time, rather than attaching them to listings one-by-one. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for this. We also added the upload box to all the media pages to make it quicker and easier to find.

Copy Clients on Property Email Alerts

When a user saves a search, they can choose to be notified daily or weekly by email of new or updated properties that match their search criteria. They can now enter a second email address (for their client, assistant, administrator, etc) to be copied on those property alerts. It’s a great way to show clients that you’re on top of the market. To try this out: run a property search and click the “Save Search” link on the upper left-hand side. Then just enter a valid email address in the field labeled: “Send a copy to client email address”.

Copy Company Administrator on Listing Reminders

In order to keep data fresh and accurate, we require users to update and verify their listings regularly. Users can now choose to have their company administrator copied on all of the email reminders we send out. To enable this: log in to your CIE, click on the “My Account” tab at the top, then the “Edit Email Preferences” link. Then just click the link to “Copy my company administrator on all email”.

Post Private, Member-Only Notes on your Listings

When listing a property, there is often important information that you don’t want just anyone to see. Users can now add notes to each listing that are only viewable by other agents who are viewing their listing — these notes are not visible to the general public. Look for “Agent Notes” below the listing overview box.

View Listing Price Reductions

We’re now tracking data on listing price changes. Going forward, you’ll see a price history on every listing record detailing reductions (or increases) including dates.

Improvements to Listing Presentations

Besides adding the price histories, we’ve also made a few changes to the format of our listing presentations that should make them easier to read, highlighting the most important information. We’ve also overhauled the way we display spaces for lease. Here’s an example.

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools in a couple months.