Commercial Real Estate Blog

We’ve just released a new round of improvements to our CIE platform! Over the past year, we’ve built partnerships with providers of the best CRE data available, including tax/assessment/loan records, owners and tenants, traffic counts, current and projected demographics, GIS map layers, etc. Several of our CIEs have already made this information available, and others are in the process.

Our focus over the past few months has been on taking that new data and integrating it within our CIEs in a way that makes the information easy to understand. These latest changes are a big step toward our goal of making our locally-controlled databases a one-stop-shop for commercial real estate information in each market.

Improvements to Navigation & Search

We’ve made it much easier to get around your CIE. All major functions are now instantly accessible thanks to the new drop-down menu bar at the top of the screen. This should drastically reduce the number of clicks it takes to get at the information you need.

We’ve also overhauled the search pages to make it easier for you to see all the different kinds of information that can be searched. You’ll notice the new menu on the left-hand side that will allow you to quickly toggle between different searches. The new search pages are a lot less cluttered, and should be easier on the eyes. We’ve made searching by keyword easier to find and more effective. The keyword fields will also auto-populate with popular terms to save time and avoid typos. Finally, when searching for listings or comparables, you will now see a “Show on Map” option allowing you to go directly to the “Map View” when searching.

Better Submarket Support Submarkets are locally-understood designations for areas that don’t always align nicely with government boundaries, ie. “Downtown” or “South City Industrial District”. If your CIE has submarket boundaries defined, you can now choose to filter your search to particular submarkets by visually selecting those areas on a map. Look for the “Select Submarket” link under the location box when searching for listings, comps, or properties. If your CIE doesn’t yet have submarkets defined, let us know and we’ll work with you and your CIE administrator to set them up.

Improved Property History / Address Look-up

Because our CIEs are Property-Centric, all of the information we collect gets tied back to individual parcels. The “Property History” page makes it easy to see everything the CIE knows about a property at a particular address. We’ve just overhauled this page to be more comprehensive, including many new types of information: Active Listings for sale or lease Spaces/Parcels at that address NEW Transaction History, including sale and lease activity Property History Timeline including new listings, price changes, and expirations NEW Property/Building Details including hundreds of possible variables like size, zoning, tax ID, characteristics, etc. NEW Photos collected for that address Owner History including contact information when available NEW Tenant History including contact information when available NEW Tax History including taxes paid and assessed values when available NEW Loan History when available NEW Links to local market statistics and demographics, etc. Maps, aerial and street views

This gives your CIE the ability to function as a powerful research database, giving you quick access to data that might’ve taken hours to compile separately. To try it out, select the “Property Histories” option under the “Search” menu, and enter an address.

If your CIE doesn’t currently provide tax records or owner and tenant information, get in touch with your CIE administrator and let them know you want it. The data is available should your CIE choose to integrate it.

Confidential Prices for Sale Transactions

Many agents aren’t comfortable sharing details about their transactions, especially the sale price. We’ve added a new option for users reporting sales: “Keep Price Confidential”. This allows the CIE to use the price to generate more accurate market statistics, but allows the agent to keep the price private. No one else will be able to see the entered price.

QR Codes for Reports

QR codes are a new form of barcode that can be scanned by smartphones. All printable reports generated from your CIE can now include QR codes for each property. Once a report is printed, clients can simply scan the code and be automatically taken to the online listing presentation to view the full details. You can also choose to exclude the QR codes from their reports by selecting that option when customizing their report. Learn more about QR codes and Commercial Real Estate.

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 and enhancements later this year.

We’ve just wrapped up our Fall round of improvements to our commercial information exchanges! To take advantage of these tools, just log in to either your local Catylist CIE, or Commercial IQ.

Major Map Upgrades, GIS Capabilities & Layering

An important part of building a successful CIE is assembling different kinds of data in a way that allows your members to make better decisions. To that end we’ve made some big upgrades to our mapping software.

Your CIE is now a fully capable GIS platform. We’ve added the ability to overlay various types of data on top of your property listings, comparables, and building records. Whether it’s heat maps, points of interest, or custom geographic boundaries like local industrial zones — your CIE is now able to integrate any GIS layers you have access to for your local market.

To start, we incorporated a few layers of Census 2009 demographic data (Population Density, Household Income, and Education Level) as well as traffic flow indicators for major streets and highways. These new layers will be available on all CIEs. We’ve also been working with CPIX in Michigan to integrate several custom layers sourced from local data including: Railroads, Airports, Hospitals, and Universities.

This is something that no other CIE platform offers and it’s just a taste of what is possible — we look forward to working with each of you to integrate local data sets.

Finally, a few additional improvements:

• In the past, we’ve limited the number of items on a map to 500. We’re removing this limit altogether — the new maps perform similar to a heat map in areas with many listings.
• All of these new layers will transfer automatically to the PDF reports generated from the CIE.
• All maps now have a box-zoom feature, and a distance measuring tool.
• We also made a few changes so that clustered listings on a report don’t overlap.

New & Improved Market Statistics & Trends

We’ve completely overhauled the way we’re calculating and displaying market statistics.

Here’s how the process works. Each month, we collect a snapshot of all records (listings, properties, comparables) for your CIE. We then normalize those records, eliminating those with extremely high or low prices and sizes, and eliminating duplicates. Essentially, we build the most accurate virtual model possible of the space in your market. We then calculate various stats using these snapshots, allowing you to compare values month-to-month, identify trends.

We break the display into two pages. First, is the market summary, which gives you some high-level numbers about the market in general and allows you to compare property types side-by-side. You can then click deeper to view specifics for each property type, including 3-month and 12-month averages, 12-month trends, and submarket comparisons.

• We’re now tracking new statistics like “Days on Market”, and “Percentage Below List”, which measure the average discount from the original sale price.
• If your CIE tracks off-market properties, you’ll see new variables including: Total Inventory SF, Total Listed SF, Total Occupied SF, Vacancy Rate, and Net Absorption SF.
• Filter stats by location and property type.
• Download stats into a very nice company-branded PDF report, ready for clients.

The more research your CIE is doing, the more complete the database, and the more meaningful the statistics. The stats are available to CIE members only. Access them via the “View Market Statistics” link on your console, or by clicking through to “View More Market Stats” from any listing.

CIE Homepage Redesign

We gave our CIE sites a face-lift, based on some great suggestions we received from many of you. The new homepage is designed to better engage those searching for commercial space – we hope you like the new look!

Confidential Lease Rates

Everyone wants to know what rates spaces are leasing at, but few are willing to share the information. This causes many users to enter false information when entering the lease details of their completed transactions. We’ve added the ability to “Keep Lease Rate Confidential” when entering the rate. If that box is clicked, we will never display the lease rate. We will, however, be able to use it anonymously when calculating market stats. The rate for that particular space stays a secret, while the entire CIE benefits by tracking a more accurate lease rate average.

Space for Lease Display

Previously when searching for lease space, we display each space as a separate item in search results, even if those spaces are in the same building. We still think this is great for people searching for space. When displaying an agent’s or a company’s listings however, having the spaces separate is less desirable. We’ve made a change so that on profile displays like SiteLink or AgentLink, lease spaces are combined and displayed as a single building.

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 and enhancements in a couple months.

Commercial brokers live on their phones, and contrary to much of the hype, not all of them are iPhones. We’ve spent the past couple months listening to you and getting a feel for the types of tools that would be truly useful to the commercial broker on-the-go. Here are the features we heard requested again and again:

• Look up a colleague’s phone number and call it, or plot their address on a map.
• Access your available property listings.
• Find listings for sale or lease matching particular criteria.
• Access the latest commercial real estate news, market activity, recent sales/leases, and new properties added to the market.

http://m.catylist.com

Not Just for iPhones

It’s not an iPhone app or an Android app – it’s a simple, lightweight website accessible via ANY mobile device. You shouldn’t be required to have a particular phone in order to access the data you need.

Anyone can run searches, view listings and access agent contact information, but to log in, you’ll need to be a Catylist CIE subscriber.

Let us know what you think, or if you have any ideas that would make this more useful.

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.