Commercial Real Estate Blog

Trying to keep up with current industry news is tough, even with handy tools like feed readers.

We’ve wanted to add news streams with current commercial real estate headlines to our sites for quite a while, but were having trouble deciding which source was best (most relevant, most current, etc).  Eventually, we realized that being forced to choose between fragmented news sources was an industry-wide frustration.

Why can’t we just see ALL the news?

There really isn’t one best source.  Each publication or blog is good at a particular type of reporting, or specializes in a certain type of story or industry segment.  What we really needed was a way to pull ALL of the news together. Luckily, with the help of recent syndication technologies, we were able to do this in a matter of hours.

Quick Introduction to Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo released a very powerful service last year that allows you to mash-up content from various sites, filter or manipulate it, then repackage it.  It gave us an easy way to take news feeds from all the major sources and combine them into a single feed.  It’s really an amazing application and very useful for anyone who monitors lots of feeds, even if you’re not technically-inclined.

The finished product

So after a little post-processing to handle feed idiosyncrasies, remove duplicates, etc. we have a glorious aggregated news feed:

http://www.commercialiq.com/news/

Each story links to the original source for the full version, so we’re really just acting as a comprehensive search engine for CRE news.  Also notice that you can subscribe directly to this consolidated feed — much better than having to subscribe individually to 15+ sources!

Next steps

Now that we have all the news together, the next logical step is to allow readers to choose which bits they care about. We’ll be working on various customization options (location and keyword filters, etc) in the near future.

Let us know what you think, or if you have any other sources you’d like to see us add to the list.