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.

Information is the key currency of the commercial real estate industry.  Having the right data is essential to success, but compiling and maintaining it is extremely costly.  As a vendor, possessing the data gives you power over those who need it and that’s easy to monetize.  So it makes sense that companies like LoopNet and CoStar take ownership of the data and don’t share.  It’s good for business, but forcing practitioners to waste time moving and re-entering data hurts the industry.

Since our master plan is to organize local communities, we don’t struggle with this issue as much.  For a market to be truly successful, information needs to flow in and out of local listing services, company websites, economic development websites, publications, contact databases, analytics engines, etc.  Sharing data strengthens a community, and we’d like to see more people come together.  To that end, we’ve spent a lot of time giving users as many options as possible to publish and extract their data.

What we’d really love to see though, is a data standard — a common format that would let data flow from place to place without all the usual headaches.  A few years ago, we were part of an OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate) work group whose goal was to create a data standard for commercial real estate.  The idea was to come up with a standard XML definition that made sense to the various disciplines (brokers, appraisers, etc.), and the benefits are pretty compelling:

• Minimize data entry of property for sale or lease into multiple marketing sites (From multiple times to single entry);
• Cutting costs of data management. With a single data export, all marketing channels will be able to be kept current.
• Improve data quality. Providing data definitions will contribute to better data quality and easier data interpretation.
• Improve the ease of data management. Providing data in a consistent format will allow data originators and receivers to more readily manage data from different sources.
• Re-purpose data for other activities. Data formatted for OSCRE CIE purposes can be used for other business activities, saving time and resources formatting the data and interpreting the results.

After making some great strides forward early on, bureaucracy started to drag on the progress.  A rough standard was published in some form last year, but doesn’t seem to be available now and we haven’t heard a mention of it since.

Data Portability isn’t going away, and I fully believe it’s only a matter of time until the industry gets it’s act together.  But how long must we wait?

Update:  It looks like I might have just been out of the loop.  I saw this story today:

OSCRE Rocks CIO Roundtable at Realcomm 2008: The Interoperability Showcase

“If you doubt the work of OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium of Real Estate) or, even worse, have never heard of it, you should have been at the CIO Roundtable at the Realcomm Conference in San Diego on June 9. Interoperability was “alive-and-well” when more than 200 real estate IT executives watched live demonstrations of 3 of OSCRE’s 7 Standards for the real estate industry conducted by the members of OSCRE.”

That’s good news!  I’ll update this post again if I can get a copy of the specification.

You’ve seen the little orange icons everywhere, but what’s the deal with this “web feed” stuff?

You probably subscribe to a couple magazines and newspapers, delivered right to your door. It would be very inconvenient to drive around to multiple places to pick them up. RSS is a technology that allows you to subscribe to websites. Instead of having to visit each website to see if there is anything new you can subscribe using the RSS feed published on almost any website.

Here are a few examples:

1. Each day, you read the Wall Street Journal’s Business section, so you subscribe to their news feed to get the latest articles.
2. You love basketball and want to receive news updates for the NBA via ESPN.
3. You think Catylist is a great company, and you want to keep up with changes and events via their blog.
4. You’re currently searching for office space for a client in Tampa. After running your search on Commercial IQ, you click the orange Feed icon in the upper right to have matching listings delivered to you as they’re posted.
5. To keep up with what’s happening in the commercial real estate industry, you use Yahoo Pipes to build a feed by aggregating and filtering news from several sources (Ok, this one is a little more advanced).

Subscribing to each of these allows you to open one application to read all of the new information posted on all the websites you care about. It’s incredibly convenient and efficient, and you’ll know you’re never missing out on news. Here’s a video with some additional explanation.

Get a Feed Reader

To get started, you’ll need to choose a Feed Reader. Here are the most popular options:

• Google Reader – This one runs in your browser, so you don’t have to install another application on your Desktop.
• NetNewsWire – The most popular choice for Macs
• FeedDemon – One of many decent options for Windows

Once your reader is up and running, keep an eye out for the orange icon on your favorite sites. Welcome to the future!

Targeted Marketing for Commercial Agents

1. In the past, commercial practitioners did not do much targeted marketing; now recipients of commercial real estate marketing are expressing a strong desire to get information that matches their preferences, so the shift is toward targeted marketing.
2. CRM databases are coming into popular use, more affordable market research is available, and more sophisticated software programs allow people to build big databases and refine them to do targeted marketing based on anticipated needs.

Commercial Listings

1. Gellman is aware of 25 national commercial listing services plus a myriad of local solutions; the biggest national ones are Catylist, Loopnet and CoStar; other classified systems include CityFeet and Property Line.
2. People want to use all of these as well as smaller ones such as OfficeSpace.com and BuildingSearch.com; the opportunities are numerous.
3. Good brokers do not choose—they use all the commercial services by building a set of processes to participate as efficiently as possible.
4. The basic process is to first say where you want your information to go, then how much information should go, at what time, and who is responsible for getting it posted; a repeatable process makes posting information online efficient.
5. Offices that lack the resources to handle a commercial listing process in-house should outsource the process.
6. Catylist is creating a bridge between its database and as many different partners as possible—10 major listing services so far; do not overlook the other 15 because each one has a slightly different target audience.

Advice for Single Practitioners

1. Use listing services to level the playing field and even to gain a competitive advantage over larger companies; understand the differences of each listing service in terms of audience, cost structure and how to participate with minimal time and expenditure.
2. Communicate to your clients that you use the commercial listing services for broad marketing distribution—it is a competitive advantage.
3. Highlight your use of technology to impress property owners in listing presentations; have a marketing plan in place and communicate it clearly to prospects.

How to Develop a Marketing Plan

1. The first step should be the production of materials; digitize property information into spreadsheets, word documents, audio and/or video.
2. Next identify all the different places where the information can be distributed—e.g., online, or through mail, blogs or audiocasts.
3. Finally, identify the target audience—that is, the most likely purchasers or tenants—and how they can best be reached.

Technology for Small Offices

1. To stay within budget, brokers should understand what they are buying, so education (by reading or taking classes) is a necessary prerequisite.
2. The first vital tech tool is a very good web site—clearly segmented and showing who you cater to and why you are good at it; preferably, the web site should be interactive.
3. On the web site, clients should be able to see listings, leave contact info and preferences, sign up for a newsletter and report a problem; the broker should be able to keep track of clients’ needs.
4. Commercial agents have lagged residential agents in embracing technology by three to five years, but initial commercial resistance is changing.
5. The second imperative tech tool is email marketing, which has two dimensions—property marketing and corporate marketing; both should be preference-based.
6. Corporate email marketing should be employed to keep in touch with clients and others on your proprietary database on a regular basis.
7. Make use of industry databases as a supplement to your internal contacts; Catylist’s program called Cmail is an industry database of 100,000+ people qualified to receive email on investment properties.

CRM Database

1. Another important tech requirement is a customer relationship management (CRM) database to organization and keep track of what you do for clients; SalesForce.com is the industry-specific CRM for commercial real estate.
2. As a web-based solution, SalesForce.com requires an Internet connection and runs a little slower than a CRM resident on your desktop; on the upside, it makes sharing easier and preserves your information if something happens to your computer.

Overview of Catylist Commercial Tools and Services

1. One of the company’s core products is its national listing service Commercial IQ, which aggregates local listing services from about 36 markets nationwide.
2. Commerical IQ offers a toolbox of tech marketing tools, including commercial real estate web sites, a print engine to generate materials and demographic resources; an interface is being built to automatically enter all data submitted to the listing services into the other tech tools.
3. Catylist’s local commercial multiple listing service (or CIE) remains the mainstay product; it covers about one-third of the nation now and is expanding; each local exchange offers a complete range of marketing tools.

Catylist’s Competitive Edge

1. The three main commercial exchange players—Catylist, CCIM’s A Site to Do Business and the new NAR commercial exchange—are all different; Catylist’s edge is that it leads with technology and the integration of all its products.
2. Catylist offers the ultimate value to commercial practitioners in saving time and effort and increasing service to clients.

Listing Overview

We’ve updated the Listing Overview page to provide added context:

• View contextual Demographics and Market statistics right on the listing page (for Full Access Users)
• See the property in fullscreen Google Street View (where available) with links to Microsoft Bird’s Eye aerials
• We now show all details and attachments upfront (no more “View All Details” button)
• Link Directly to your listing. Copy & Paste link into your emails to clients and prospects
• Links to our new “Property History” page, which displays all listings and comps for a particular address

Demographic Statistics

Our newly integrated demographics information allows you to perform quick and reliable market analysis. Our information is provided by SRC, an industry leading demographics company. Demographics greatly enhance your marketing presentations and provide you and your clients with an array of contextual information.

• Automatically embedded on Listing and Comparables pages
• Can be exported as PDF or Excel files

Market Statistics

What’s the average lease rate per sq. ft. for office space in your market area? How many square feet of shopping center space is currently available in your market? The addition of our new Market Statistics* will help you to quickly answer these types of questions and will provide you with a snapshot of current market conditions.

• Automatically embedded on Listing and Comparables pages
• Statistics are available for any location with more than 100 listings
• Can be exported as PDF or Excel files

*All market statistics are compiled using available listing information in the Catylist database for any given market area based on broker loaded data.

Marketing Report

The marketing report is an excellent communication tool for you to share online activity information with your clients. The new report, linked from the promote page, includes:

• A list of marketing channels that the listing is being marketed on
• Channel-by-channel viewing statistics
• If desired, a custom message from the listing agent to the client

And finally, Quick-Edit is now full-screen, and supports suites.

In addition to Google, REBusinessonline.com, CIMLS and the Zana Network, you can now display your listing information on Lyco/Oodle, one of the Web’s largest classifieds networks.
We’ve also changed the “Promote” listing page to display logos for local distribution channels, including: France Publication regional websites, Economic Development websites (where applicable), and other distribution points that are specific to your local market.

Make Sure Your Listings are Getting Maximum Exposure:

• Go to http://market.catylist.com
• Login with your username/password.
• Click “Manage Property Listings”
• Click “Promote” next to the listing you want to send.
• Click “Find Out More” to distribute your listing to the appropriate website.

Specify Display Order of Attachments & Lease Suites

You can now change the order in which uploaded listing attachments (including images) as well as suites for lease appear.

How it Works:

• Click the appropriate link under CIE Content Manger.
• Use the corresponding arrows to move the document higher or lower on the list or drag and drop to the desired position.

NEW Printable Comparison Report

We’ve added a new report that mimics the “compare” feature of the site. You can generate a printable PDF report that compares up to four properties per page in a side-by-side format. Just a reminder: You be logged in to create reports.

Auto-Populate Property Location

When adding a new listing, just enter the postal code and we’ll auto-fill the city and state.

Lease Pending for Suites

You now have the ability to mark individual suites as lease pending.

How it Works:

• Click “Manage Property Listings”.
• Click “Edit Listing”.
• Click “Space” tab.
• Click “Lease Pending” link next to the appropriate suite.

Have Questions?

Contact the Help Desk at 877.595.5478 or help@catylist.com

• Improved location mapping
• Easier interface for adding photos and attachments
• Reduced the number of property fields – by moving infrequently used fields to the ‘additional details’ section
• Added a new details section where you can create your own data fields to help in describing your property

The end result: it’s a lot easier to add and edit listings.

Market Listings Efficiently
Access the most commonly used functions directly from the manage listings page:

• Edit: Build customized listing presentations with over 100 fields of detail and unlimited photos and documents
• Promote: Publish your listings to your company website, numerous online listing services, media publications, email networks, and more
• Track: View traffic statistics, measure your progress, generate qualified leads, and close your deal*Market Listings Everywhere*

We are increasing our efforts to help real estate professionals market listings in as many places as possible. We’ve improved the Promote page to include three distribution tabs: web, email and print.

Web: Send your listing to multiple websites

• National CIE – search.catylist.com
• Local CIE
• Your Company Website (SiteLink required)
• Google
• MyNextDeal
• France Publications: REBusinessOnline.com

Email: Create and send broadcast email

• * Cmail Marketing – www.cmailmarketing.com
• * Post a Have
• * Basic email functions

Print/Export: Design professional quality marketing materials and export your listings in three common file formats

• Generate customized Print Brochures
• Create postcards and order other marketing materials with REBackOffice
• Export your property listings in XML, XLS, or CSV format

Friendlier Lead Generation
Inquiries coming from Catylist CIEs will now contain more information®making it easier for you to know which listing is being referenced.

Sitelink Clients: Showcase Your Featured Listings!
You can now highlight company listings on the main search page of your SiteLink listing engine. Select specific featured listings or let SiteLink choose them at random.

Catylist Mobile, Beta
We are deploying a simple version of selected CIEs for display on mobile devices. These mobile sites will have scaled back functionality, but will allow users to search and display listing, agent, and company information. Point your phones to http://mobile.catylist.com, or to your local CIE.

Improved Promote Page
The “Promote your listing” page has been streamlined in order at accommodate future additions. We will be adding several new options to this page in the near future and hope that it becomes a single place for users to monitor the marketing of each property listing.

Export listings to the Google Base
There’s a new addition to the promote page that allows users to opt in to export their property listings to the Google Base automatically each night. Listings sent to Google will be indexed and searchable. More about Google Base here.

Additional Improvements

• The listing overview page has been redesigned
• Admins and agents can once again export listings from CIE Manager
• CIE and Company admins can now add International users, and International users can now register for any of our CIEs
• The “Compare” feature has been added to catalogs