Commercial Real Estate Blog

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…

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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…

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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…

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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!

The Indiana Commercial Board of REALTORS® is one of our many clients hosting a local commercial real estate database for its members. These databases are called Commercial Information Exchanges (CIEs) and allow members to share information about commercial properties for sale or lease, analyze market statistics and recent transactions, and network with others in the industry. A CIE is a grassroots alternative to large national databases, and allows the local brokers to maintain ownership and control of their data.

The CIE movement has been gaining momentum for the past several years, and this article does a great job of explaining the motivations.

Read on for the full article, or click here for a scanned version from the paper.

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We’re very happy to welcome our newest CIE client — a regional commercial listing service serving New England! The CIE is a collaboration of three associations: New Hampshire Commercial Investment Board of REALTORS®, the Maine Commercial Association of REALTORS® and the Vermont Commercial Investment Board of REALTORS®.

The new site launched today!

“We have one of the oldest and most established CIE services in the country and we are excited about the opportunity to offer the Catylist CIE service to our members. Catylist CIE offers the most advanced service available on an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. It will increase marketing efficiencies for our members and enable them to better serve their clients”. — Dave Lefebvre, CPE Chair for the New Hampshire Commercial Investment Board of REALTORS®.

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

Read on for the full press release…

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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…

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