While referring to present-day as the “Internet Age” might conjure images of cavemen trading in their clubs for keyboards, this article in the March issue of REALTOR magazine has some interesting ideas for commercial real estate professionals: Marketing Your Listings in the Internet Age

“I now consider CIEs just another cost of doing business,” says Jason Hart, principal of San Luis Obispo, California–based Hart Commercial Real Estate, a company that sells and leases commercial properties. “It’s like putting a For Sale or For Rent sign on the Internet.”

These days, most commercial professionals should agree with Mr. Hart. The Internet has become the largest and most powerful marketing tool when listing a commercial property.

“Compared with residential multiple listing services where everyone uses the same database, commercial listing services are highly fragmented by property type and location,” says Bob Gibbons, who subscribes to several CIEs. “You have to put your listings everywhere you think they can be seen.”

We hear the same comments everyday and have been working hard to find a solution to the problem. Our goal with Commercial IQ is to simplify the process into two steps:

1. Build a killer listing presentation — Add as much information as you want and upload an unlimited number of photos, maps, plans, video and other documentation to help searchers learn more about the property. We augment your listing automatically with demographic data, market statistics, and aerial imagery.
2. Send it everywhere — It’s a lot of work to build the perfect presentation and you shouldn’t have to repeat the task a dozen times. In addition to exposure on Commercial IQ, we automatically distribute your listing to dozens of sites, including CommercialSource.com, CIMLS, Vast, Oodle, GoogleBase, 35+ local CIEs and 20+ economic development sites. You can even display it on your company website with our SiteLink product.

The commercial real estate industry has a ways to go, but things are always evolving. Give Commercial IQ a try — registration is free.

Our information exchanges are partnered with almost two dozen local chambers and ED groups around the country, and we’re adding more all the time.  See the press release below for the latest addition: the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.

Find out more about our EDCLink product: http://www.catylist.com/edclink

If you’re interested in linking up your local chamber of commerce or economic development site, contact Shane Hayes: shane@catylist.com.

Chattanooga Association of REALTORS® Teams with Local Chamber to Help Bring New Business to the Area

The Tennessee Valley Commercial Listing Service (CLS), powered by Catylist and operated by the Commercial Investment Council of the Chattanooga Association of REALTORS®, recently partnered with the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce to display commercial real estate for sale or lease on the Chamber’s website.   The Tennessee Valley CLS website, launching earlier this year, provides access to over 500 available industrial, office, and retail properties as well as vacant land throughout Southeast Tennessee, Northwest Georgia, and Northeast Alabama at www.TennesseeValleyCLS.com.  In addition to buildings, users can also search for local commercial REALTORS® to assist in their relocation efforts.  The same search-engine functionality and property data set, updated in real-time, will be available on the Chamber website via EDCLink, also powered by Catylist, in early November.

While the database will provide access for all companies seeking to relocate, this partnership comes on the heels of a major business expansion in the area. Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. recently announced that it will build a U.S. automotive production facility in Chattanooga. The expansion is expected to bring nearly 2,000 new jobs to the area and an investment of $1 billion to the economy. The online database and direct contact with local commercial real estate professionals will assist suppliers in locating facilities as new contracts are awarded by Volkswagen.

The database will be available at www.chattanooga-chamber.com.

About CIC of the Chattanooga Association of REALTORS®
The Commercial Investment Council of the Chattanooga Association of REALTORS® is composed of over 400 office, industrial, retail, and investment real estate brokers, salespeople, property managers, appraisers and others engaged in all aspects of the commercial real estate industry in the Tennessee valley.  By fostering information sharing, education and advocacy in the interests of licensed commercial real estate practitioners throughout the region, its REALTORS® remain leaders in conducting their business professionally, successfully and ethically by adhering to the strict REALTOR® Code of Ethics.

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.

Listings posted to Commercial IQ or Catylist local exchanges can now be automatically sent to Vast.com, one of the largest online classifieds sites.

Are there other sites you’d like to see your listings sent to each night? Let us know!

Read on for the press release…

Chicago, IL – Catylist Inc., the nation’s leading provider of marketing-based commercial information exchange (CIE) technology for commercial real estate communities and brokerage firms, announced that Vast.com, a leading vertical search platform for real estate (as well as autos and travel), has been added to the Catylist distribution network.

Subscribers of the Catylist Network, which includes the premier National commercial listing exchange, Commercial IQ, www.commercialiq.com, and nearly 40 local Catylist-powered commercial information exchanges, can now send their commercial properties listed for sale or lease to Vast.com without re-entering the data. Listings will automatically update on a nightly basis. Catylist subscribers will also have the ability to monitor traffic activity generated at Vast.com for each listing.
“According to Ron Marten, CCIM, Catylist’s CEO and President, “This alliance further demonstrates our commitment of providing members of the Catylist Network with an efficient means of marketing their listings through as many different marketing channels as possible.”

Other distribution partners include Google Base, Lycos/Oodle, CIMLS, REBusinessOnline, Heartland Real Estate Business, Southeast Real Estate Business, Northeast Real Estate Business, Western Real Estate Business, and the Zana Network. Catylist expects to add additional channels in the near future.
About Vast.com.

Vast.com is the leading vertical search platform for autos, travel, and real estate, with millions of users a month making purchasing decisions through Vast.com‘s network of partner websites. Vast.com improves the online shopping experience with the largest selection, sub-second search times, and intuitive auto, real estate, and vacation rental search that helps users find the best match on the Internet for their needs. Founded in 2001 and backed by Clearstone Venture Partners and Leapfrog Ventures, Vast.com is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Belgrade, Serbia. For additional information, visit www.vast.com.

Subscribers of the Catylist Network, including Catylist.com and over 40 local Catylist-powered commercial information exchanges, can now send their commercial properties listed for sale or lease to the Lycos and Oodle websites without re-entering the data. Listings sent to these sites will be automatically updated on a nightly basis.

Other partners in Catylist’s distribution network include Google Base, CIMLS, ReBusinessOnline, Florida Real Estate Journal and the Zana Network. These additional distribution points give Catylist subscribers a tremendous amount of listing exposure for their properties with the convenience of being able to manage those distribution points from one database. Catylist expects to add additional channels in the near future.

About Lycos, Inc.

http://www.lycos.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Daum Communications Corp., a leading Internet portal and e-commerce destination in Korea with a growing presence throughout the Asian markets. Lycos, Inc. operates search and technology websites that foster online communities, including the new Lycos Cinema and Lycos MIX video platforms, combining community with high-quality broadband video content. Other Lycos products and sites include Lycos.com, Hotbot.com, Tripod.com, Angelfire.com, Gamesville.com, Lycos Mail, Lycos 50(TM), Lycos Entertainment and Lycos Music.

About Oodle, Inc.

Oodle, Inc. is a search engine for local classified listings. Oodle’s mission is to provide consumers with online tools that make it easier to buy, sell and give locally. Launched in April of 2005, Oodle (www.oodle.com) now covers over 100 metropolitan areas in the US. For more information, please visit http://www.oodle.com.

Highlights of the deal include Florida Real Estate Journal’s commitment to deliver timely news and information to Catylist’s membership base by providing valuable search-friendly content. In exchange, Catylist will provide access to its database of more than 200,000 commercial property listings through the Florida Real Estate Journal website.

“We are very excited about our partnership with Catylist. It furthers the Florida Real Estate Journal’s goal of driving targeted traffic to our site through partnering with great brands,” said Jay Hook, circulation and IT director of Florida Real Estate Journal. “This partnership broadens the exposure that our content receives while offering the members of Catylist easy access to thousands of commercial real estate articles.”

About Florida Real Estate Journal
In its 15th year as Florida’s premier commercial real estate publication, Florida Real Estate Journal (http://www.frej.net) provides comprehensive statewide coverage of the Florida commercial real estate markets as well as national commercial real estate developments with impact in Florida. Coverage includes significant commercial real estate transactions, financings, people in the news, interviews with industry leaders, profiles of leading companies, and regional reports.

Subscribers of the Catylist Network, including Catylist.com and over 40 local Catylist-powered commercial information exchanges, can now send their commercial properties listed for sale or lease to CIMLS.com without re-entering the data. Listings will be automatically updated on CIMLS.com on a nightly basis.

“We are excited about how this partnership benefits both CIMLS.com and Catylist members. CIMLS.com users now have access to more listings, while Catylist member’s listings have exposure to over 100,000 commercial real estate professionals in the CIMLS.com network” said James Van Boxtel, CIMLS’ Director.

Other partners in Catylist’s distribution network include Google Base, MyNextDeal, ReBusinessOnline and the Zana Network. Catylist expects to add additional channels in the near future.

From your CIE website, you now have the option to include national listings in your search criteria.

Users who are logged in can choose to:

• Search listings from ALL sources nationally
• Search local CIE member listings only

Improved Tracking & Lead Generator

The graphs and stats now use a more descriptive site name instead of a URL, and we’re tracking hits that come specifically from third party partners, including:

• Google Base
• MyNextDeal
• REBusinessOnline.com
• Zana Network

We’ve added a new section that allows you view a list of members who have shown some level of interest in your listing. The list is compiled using the following criteria:

• Who has viewed the listing?
• Who has emailed it?
• Who has it cataloged?
• Who’s searching with parameters that match the listing?

Only members who are logged in will be included on the list.

Redesigned Broadcast Emails

We’ve created a new HTML broadcast email template. The new version includes a cleaner layout, more records per page and improved subject lines.

Easier Listing Exposure

You can now opt in ALL of your listings to a distribution channel (Google Base, MyNextDeal, etc.) instead of one at a time.

Time-Out Feature Added

To avoid losing unsaved data when editing a listing, you will now receive a notification that your session is about to time-out. Please make sure to save your changes often.

RSS Feeds

Track an RSS feed from any listing search you run on our sites. To access the feeds, click the “Feed” link at the top right of searches and add it to your favorite news reader. As new listings come on, the feed will automatically update.

Miscellaneous

• By popular request, you can now enter zip codes when running searches rather than choosing them from a list. Multiple zips can be entered, separated by commas.
• We’ve added character counts for most of the text entry areas in Market.Catylist so you know how much room you have left. We’ve also made several of the areas wider, where possible.

• 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.