Playing Matchmaker between Retail Tenants & Available Space
When trying to find retail space for a tenant, it’s nice to have a great commercial property search engine at your disposal. Even better though is having the perfect spaces come to you. We’ve been working with our friends Paul and Luke over at VEXRAY to make that happen.
VEXRAY works with major retail clients (Little Caesars Pizza, Sears, Ace Hardware, Cinnabon, etc.) to build a complex model defining their requirements for a prospective site. They then use those models to automatically sift through retail availabilities for matches. The result is a list of highly qualified retail sites for the tenants, and qualified leads for the listing agents and property owners.
We’re currently working to feed our retail inventory into VEXRAY. Once complete, our members’ property listings will be automatically submitted to VEXRAY and matched up with dozens of major retailers nationwide — another huge benefit for our Commercial IQ and CIE subscribers.
Look for another announcement later this Spring.
Add your listings to Commercial IQ now!
Read on for the full release…
500 New Retail Sites Wanted in 2009; VEXRAY Delivers Tenants to Catylist Subscribers
Despite record inventory levels in the retail marketplace there are still plans by national retailers to open over 4,000 new units in 2009, according to a recent study conducted by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Roughly 12% of those new unit openings will come from retailers using a revolutionary new real estate match-making service called VEXRAY. VEXRAY identifies optimal site opportunities among the expansive universe of supply for any retailer’s unique concept.
VEXRAY’S premise is simple. By working with growing retailers to identify key drivers of success, VEXRAY is able to use high-powered data-mining techniques and over 1,000 success attributes to help each retailer quickly assess the entire inventory of supply to identify the sites that will maximize sales potential and minimize the risk of sales cannibalization between existing units.
“VEXRAY now allows our entire field team to stay focused on high potential real estate data. Prior to VEXRAY our staff spent hours reviewing hundreds of emails and faxes of unsolicited site materials, most of which really never had a chance to be developed by [Ace] because they failed some major test of viability. VEXRAY now eliminates those on the front end; saving our people time and keeping our limited resources focused on only high potential sites. On the flip side of that same coin, I think Vexray is also a huge win for the listing agents who can now immediately know where they stand with Ace [and other participating retailers] so they too can focus their resources where it counts. In an environment like we are in – who can squander time chasing after futile opportunities. It’s a win-win mechanism.” said John Venhuizen, Vice President Retail & Business Development for Ace Hardware Corporation.
VEXRAY goes deeper into the site evaluation process than traditional listing services or basic filtering engines. By assessing business specific requirements such as sales potential, competitive impact, key tenant impact, brand strength, lifestage factors, and market capture rate, VEXRAY has the ability to more intelligently determine how well a site will perform for each retailer. The result is a real-time streaming list of the highest potential sites for each retailer. VEXRAY’S retailer roster includes household names such as Ace Hardware, Little Caesars Pizza, Schlotzsky’s, Cinnabon, Carvel, and Moe’s Southwest Grill among others.
To further enhance the match-making science of VEXRAY, a recent partnership with Catylist, an industry leading listing service, has created a valuable proposition for the commercial listing agent as well. By integrating Catylist’s extensive warehouse of 8,000 available retail listings from Commercial IQ and their local commercial listing services around the country, VEXRAY has been able to identify and connect each listing agent to the retailers best suited for their site. The integration is scheduled to launch later this month.
In processing all 8,000 available properties against the needs of 14 retailers, VEXRAY’S intelligence engine found that roughly 11,000 highly qualified site leads are possible matches. This means that Catylist subscribers gain the benefit of knowing exactly which retailers need their site right now. Their sites jump to the top of each retailer’s list of high potential sites and, when the time is right, the retailer has the necessary information to contact the listing agent and take the next step.
The combination of listing service data with intelligent data-mining now allows both agents and retailers to maximize limited resources on the highest potential sites saving time and money. VEXRAY saves the listing agent time by:
- Identifying high potential tenant leads
- providing those leads with the demographic, competitive, co-tenant, and sales potential data needed to properly assess their site
- allowing the agent to reach all 14 companies with one-click to find out exactly how well their site stacks up
For retailers, VEXRAY reduces the amount of time spent reviewing undesirable listing information and provides them a dynamic, real-time view of the available properties that offer the greatest potential to meet their requirements.