Commercial Real Estate Blog

We received a lot of great suggestions over the past couple months, and have been hard at work incorporating these improvements into our commercial information exchanges. Grab a cup of coffee, and read over the changes below!

Meet the Listing Fixer!

Whether you’re an agent or company administrator, you likely spend a good deal of time making sure your listings are accurate, complete, and up-to-date. We’ve created a new tool to make this job much quicker and easier.

If you have listings that need attention, you’ll see a bright red message waiting for you when you log in to your CIE. Just click the “Fix This” link, and you’ll be taken to the new Listing Fixer. You’ll see the problem listings on the left; clicking each one will tell you exactly what’s wrong, displaying only the fields you need to change. This allows you to quickly move through the list minimizing clicking, scrolling and searching to find problems.

This tool is something no other listing service (commercial or residential) offers, and besides making your life easier, we think it will drastically improve commercial property data integrity.

Link to Social Media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Blogs

You can now link your CIE profile to your accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or to your blog. This also works for company profiles. We’ve seen a steady increase in usage of these sites by CRE professionals, and we’re planning more integration later this year. Here’s an example of a CIE member profile using the new Social Media links: http://www.cpix.net/agent/20353

Combined Search: Active, Expired & Withdrawn Listings, Comps, and Building/Land Records

There’s a lot of searchable data on your CIE, and we’re always working to make it easier for you to find exactly what you need. You can now perform all property-related searches on the same page: Active Listings, Expired/Withdrawn, Comparables, and Building/Land Records (for CIEs that have off-market property data). Here’s a before and after comparison.

A few changes to note:

• We moved the Address Lookup box to the top of the search page to make it easier to find. Use this when you want to find out everything we know about a particular address (current listings, price changes, sale/lease history, links to tax records, etc).
• The new page makes it easier to search for specialty types: investment property, auctions, distressed property & price reductions.
• We made it easier to post wants, save searches, and create property alerts. You’ll now see direct links to these options when you’re viewing search results.

Display your Listings Anywhere with a Listing Widget

The Listing Widget is a new tool that allows you to embed a few listings on any website or blog, just by pasting some JavaScript into the page. You can build your widget by logging in, then clicking through to the “Promote” page for any listing. For SiteLink users, the widget will link directly to listing presentations on your SiteLink, so this is a great way to drive eyeballs to your listings.

FREE Company Administrator Training

We currently offer free online training sessions 4 days a week. We’re adding a 5th day, specifically geared toward company administrators, who are always hard at work behind the scenes. Neal will be leading these sessions, which will give admins a broad overview of how to get the most out of the system as well as answer any specific questions they may have. These will be held every Tuesday, and we encourage you or your company’s admin to attend. Sign Up Now!

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools in a couple months.

We’re excited to roll out another round of improvements tonight! These changes are now live on all of our Commercial Information Exchanges around the country, and on Commercial IQ (our national commercial real estate search engine).

New and Improved Listing Traffic Reporting

One of the most useful features of our CIEs is the ability to enter a listing once, then distribute it automatically to dozens of websites. By clicking on the “Track” link for any of your listing presentations, we allow you to monitor how many people have viewed it, and which site they viewed it on. We’ve overhauled this section to make it easier to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts:

• New Design — The new layout, addition of logos for each website, and improved charts better emphasize the important information, making the traffic data easier to read and understand.
• Greater Consistency — You can export this data into a marketing report for your reference, or to give to your client. The improved “Track” web page and the PDF report format are much more consistent, displaying the same information.
• More Date Options — We’ve added the ability to toggle between 4 date ranges: 30 days, 90 days, 1 Year, and All Time. These ranges affect both the “Track” page and the corresponding PDF reports.
• Access for Admins — Your company administrator can now access this section to monitor traffic received by any or all property listings for your company. This will make it easier to track the effectiveness of tools like SiteLink.

Upload Multiple Photos Simultaneously

Users can now upload multiple photos at the same time, rather than attaching them to listings one-by-one. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for this. We also added the upload box to all the media pages to make it quicker and easier to find.

Copy Clients on Property Email Alerts

When a user saves a search, they can choose to be notified daily or weekly by email of new or updated properties that match their search criteria. They can now enter a second email address (for their client, assistant, administrator, etc) to be copied on those property alerts. It’s a great way to show clients that you’re on top of the market. To try this out: run a property search and click the “Save Search” link on the upper left-hand side. Then just enter a valid email address in the field labeled: “Send a copy to client email address”.

Copy Company Administrator on Listing Reminders

In order to keep data fresh and accurate, we require users to update and verify their listings regularly. Users can now choose to have their company administrator copied on all of the email reminders we send out. To enable this: log in to your CIE, click on the “My Account” tab at the top, then the “Edit Email Preferences” link. Then just click the link to “Copy my company administrator on all email”.

Post Private, Member-Only Notes on your Listings

When listing a property, there is often important information that you don’t want just anyone to see. Users can now add notes to each listing that are only viewable by other agents who are viewing their listing — these notes are not visible to the general public. Look for “Agent Notes” below the listing overview box.

View Listing Price Reductions

We’re now tracking data on listing price changes. Going forward, you’ll see a price history on every listing record detailing reductions (or increases) including dates.

Improvements to Listing Presentations

Besides adding the price histories, we’ve also made a few changes to the format of our listing presentations that should make them easier to read, highlighting the most important information. We’ve also overhauled the way we display spaces for lease. Here’s an example.

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools in a couple months.

Google Earth Integration & Commercial Property KML Export

Google Earth is a great tool for visualizing the locations of commercial properties, allowing you to cover lots of ground without leaving your desk. We’ve integrated Google Earth directly into Commercial IQ and our local commercial listing services providing you 3D visualizations of the commercial properties on each site.

You’ll just need to install the Google Earth plugin, then click on the “Earth” button at the top-right corner of any map, including search results and listing presentations.

For those of you using the Google Earth desktop application or another GIS service, we’ve also added the ability to export commercial properties in KML format.

Search Expired Listings

Many of our users keep an eye on listing expirations and withdrawals as a way to prospect for leads. We put in some work to make this more efficient. You can now find links to search for “Expired” or “Withdrawn” listings on the “Comparables” search tab of any of our local CIEs.

Improved Property Input & Administration

We took another look at our property input interface to make the process smoother and more intuitive. We polished dozens of areas: adding more lease rate customization, improving the organization of the fields, adding simple warning messages when information is missing or incorrect. We also added a handy tool that allows administrators to generate a spreadsheet of listings that need attention, along with a description of the problem and the contact information for the listing agent. We hope this makes it easier to stay on top of your listings, keeping the data accurate and up to date.

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service. We’ll be rolling out more great tools this Summer.

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…

Read More »

Stay on top of activity in your local market

There’s a lot to keep track of in your local commercial real estate market. We’ve been hard at work on a new feature brings all the information you need together in one place. Now, when you log into Commercial IQ or your local Commercial Information Exchange (CIE), we pull together recent activity that will be of interest to you.

Using your stored preferences (such as Offices for Sale or Lease in Ann Arbor, MI, etc), your Market Monitor will inform you when:

• New hits and leads are generated for any of your listings
• Properties are added, modified or removed from any of your catalogs or saved searches
• Newsletters, documents and more are posted by your CIE administrator
• Events are added or occurring within 7 days for your CIEs
• Commercial Real Estate news articles are posted on dozens of sites
• Matching properties are added or modified to your CIE
• Matching “Wants/Needs” are posted
• Matching property emails are broadcasted
• Matching comparables (recent sale/lease transactions) are added

You can also receive automatic notifications of all of this information either daily or weekly via email or RSS/Atom so that you never miss a deal.

Log in now and make sure your preferences reflect the types of properties and locations you’re interested in. If you’re new, create a free account — it only takes a minute.

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas to improve the service.

We’ll be experimenting with Twitter this year as another way to communicate quick updates, links or thoughts and ideas. Twitter is one of those technologies that (much like RSS) has become very useful to a very small portion of the web community. We hope it catches on. Follow us at: http://twitter.com/commercialiq

CrunchBase is TechCrunch’s online database of technology companies.

New and improved PDF Reports

We know how important it is to be able to hand your clients professional looking materials, and we’ve spent the last couple months completely overhauling our PDF brochures and reports using all the great suggestions we’ve been receiving. Here are the highlights:

• We spent a lot of time on general beautification: minimizing white-space and increasing data-density, eliminating overflow, making pages break efficiently, using better fonts and spacing.  All of the reports will now look much more professional.
• We’ve doubled the number of items (listings/properties/comparables) that can be contained in a report.
• The single-page and multi-page formats now have an option to include demographics and/or market statistic summaries.  These can be enabled when customizing a report.
• If you’re generating a multi-page brochure for a listing, you can now choose to include any/all/none of the uploaded attachments.  These will show up at the end of the same PDF.
• In addition to manually changing the order via drag-and-drop, you can now set a sort order for each report using common fields like: Date Added, Property Type, Location (State/City), Price, Size, Number of Units, Status, Cap Rate, Zoning, Agent Name (Last/First), and Company Name.
• Pages are now automatically numbered.
• The new platform is faster and more reliable.
• We’ve enabled several more report formats for comparables — they should have the same options as listing reports now.

You can check them out by clicking the “Generate PDF Brochure” link on any listing, or clicking the “Create Report” button at the top of search results.

Better support for Industrial properties

In order to make the database more useful for industrial specialists, we’ve incorporated core industrial fields like ceiling height, loading docks/doors, etc. throughout the system.

• Added industrial-specific fields to listing search results and most reports.
• Ceiling height values are now stored as a range of a minimum (clear height) and maximum value, which allows users to search more accurately.
• We also added many additional building details to comparables — you’ll notice those on overview pages and the various report formats.

Easier link-building for SiteLinks

SiteLink is our customizable search engine, ready for instant integration into company websites. We’ve tweaked our search API to make it easier for SiteLink clients to deep-link to results pages.  Here are a couple examples:

Return all sale listings:
http://signatureassociates.catylist.com/listings/sale

Return office listings for a particular City:
http://signatureassociates.catylist.com/listings/office?location=Detroit,MI

SiteLink company administrators can view some examples on the “Integration Tips” page, linked
from their console.

Miscellaneous

• Agent and company information now display in the expanded version of listing search results.
• We’re now doing a better job validating email addresses, so as to avoid bounced communications.  Users with bad email addresses will be prompted to correct them when logging in.

Thanks!

Thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us with ideas.

Notes from the latest round of upgrades:

Search for Off-Market Properties

A growing number of our CIE clients are choosing to give their communities an affordable alternative for research data and statistics by building out local databases with not only active sale/lease listings and comparables, but also records for every property in their market. If you’re a Full Access member of one of our research-enabled commercial information exchanges, you can now search the database of off-market properties alongside active listings.  You’ll see an “Off-Market” option along-side “For Sale” and “For Lease” when searching.  Off-Market properties can be compared, emailed, mapped, and used in reports just like listings.  Note: Property records must be considered “verified” to be searchable.

Improved Lease Searching

Lease searches will now return individual records for each matching space instead of a single record for each building with matching space. This will make the results (and subsequent printable reports) more accurate and eliminate much of the “why was this returned?” confusion. We’ve also improved the display of multiple suites within a building.

Better Profile Pages

Having an impressive online resume is a good way to get new business.  We spent some time cleaning up the profile pages on our sites (agent and company). You should notice lots of little improvements to both the search and display sections.  Here’s a good example: http://www.commercialiq.com/agent/17913

SiteLink Upgrades

SiteLink is our very affordable service that builds a listing search engine into your company website, which is extremely convenient if your listings are already in one of our CIE databases.  We’ve made several significant changes:

1. We’ve integrated much of the new search technology into the sites.  Results are returned in List View, with a Map View option.  There’s a expandable filters-section at the top that can be used to manipulate the results.
2. The front pages have also been given a make-over: There’s now a quick email form which should help generate leads for each SiteLink company.  Also, if a company has one or more agents with transactions being featured on their professional profiles, the most recent will now display on the front page.
3. Users can now email listings to interested parties and generate property reports directly from the SiteLink site.

Our EDCLink service for economic development communities and MediaLink service for local publications that wish to display commercial property have also been similarly upgraded. Here are a few examples:

• SiteLink (for companies): Prudential CRES, Kalamazoo
• MediaLink (for publications): Florida Real Estate Journal
• EDCLink (for economic development groups): Baton Rouge Area Chamber

CIE Manager improvements

It can be hard work managing a database of users, companies, listings, properties, transactions, etc. and we’ve made numerous changes to our tools to make life easier for CIE and company administrators.

1. The speed for listing searches should be greatly improved.
2. Search pages for users, companies, listings, transactions, and properties have been overhauled.  You can now jump to any record quickly using the Catylist ID, and we’ve created a list of common search links to save you time.
3. We’ve also added a feature to the listing searches allowing you to search for listings that are missing a particular value — useful to see all listings without Ceiling Height, for example.  We’d picked a few important fields for now, but can expand this easily by request.
4. CIE administrators can now edit company admin usernames and passwords.

Marketing Tools, News Updates

A key part of the value of Commercial IQ and our local CIEs is the tight integration with various marketing tools, which were just given an overhaul. We also added a comprehensive list of online distribution sites where members can automatically send their listings.

We added a section to the front page of Commercial IQ that tracks recent activity on the site: national industry news, Catylist updates, listings, and posted wants.  We’ll be expanding on this idea in the near future, and integrating it in some fashion into our CIEs.

Miscellaneous

• Loading Docks, Loading Doors, and Ceiling Height have been added to the expanded summary view in search results, and to the summary report.  This was highly request by ChicagoCDB and several other industrial-specialists.
• The default zoom on re-geocode pages is now closer, so users don’t have to zoom in several times to see where to click.
• We’ve patched several changes to the map view and polygon functionality lately.  It should be working better.
• The real estate services directory on our local CIEs should now be much more intuitive.

Thanks!

As always, thanks for your excellent feedback and suggestions.

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.