CommercialSource.com was created by NAR to become THE national commercial listing service. It was started with the acquisition of 10-year old ePropertyData (March 2008), which provides the engine and hosting for the commercial listing service. It currently has over 50,000 listings, growing weekly and is projected to reach 250,000 by 2009, and will continue to grow as the service is developed and features are added.
According speakers James Marrelli and Allen Benson, who presented their overview of CommercialSource.com at the NAR Commercial Alliance's Online Convention the main Commercial Source listings site will be a national display site (compared to Loopnet listings), free to NAR members.
It is being feed automatically by local CIEs and manually by licensed real estate individuals who are not members of a CIE. This is now available online for individuals. It first requires registration and then a verification step.
CommercialSource is designed to be all things commercial on the Internet for commercial property -- a one-stop site shop and marketplace for properties and resources.
The longterm objectives of CommercialSource.com is to:
1. Acquire data from local CIEs and individuals, display that information nationally and syndicate that content to other large web sites for maximum exposure and drive traffic back to listing and agents web sites.
2. Provide additional listing features/services (some that may involve charges):
- July 16th - 3 levels of enhanced listing packages
- End of 2008 - 2 more additional enhancements packages -- power marketing & productivity suite
- 2009 - will see new platforms for 1031 Exchanges and Auctions
Objectives is to only have to enter information once and use the date often, providing strong national exposure.
CommercialSource.com is the public display for brokers on a national level. It is not a CIE.
ePropertyData has additional CIE-type resources to support the broker and their web site that provide productivity packages, market history (sales and lease), feature rich reporting, site analysis, financial analysis, forms, etc. i.e., a decision support system and professional development system.
About the speakers:
James Marrelli is vice president of Second Century Ventures, (SCV) a venture capital subsidiary owned by NAR. Marrelli assumed this position after revitalizing NAR's Commercial Real Estate Division. The first acquisition of SCV is ePropertyData, a provider of commercial information exchange solutions. Marrelli will head development of NAR's national commercial property listing platform which will be part their CommercialSource website. Marrelli holds an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Finance and Marketing from Syracuse University. He is a licensed general contractor and real estate broker in Arizona and California - as well as a REALTOR.
Allen Benson is Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of ePropertyData. While still in high school Allen was writing code for Tandy Corporation and Safeway Foods. He started his career in real estate and was quickly a top producing sales associate who began integrating technology into his business.
Copyright 2008 by Lawrence Yerkes. All Rights Reserved.
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How would you compare CommercialSource to LoopNet? What are the pro's and con's of each?
I'm just in the process of learning about CommercialSource as it is so new. However, because of the backing of the NAR, it will have significant impact on the industry, increasing the options that commercial brokers have for marketing and displaying their commercial listings.
Once I have some more experience with the system, then I will do a review of the service.
In the meantime, here is my previous review of Loopnet and other related services.
It appears to me that this site is a little late to the party. There are only 58 listings for all of Ohio. I already search Costar, Loopnet, and a variety of state & Local government and Chamber of Commerce sites in order to compile my availability data. The CommercialSource search interface looks primative and cumbersome compared to the competition's map search and detailed search capabilities. Commercial property is much more complex than their model can accommodate.
Frankly, I don't see a compelling reason to believe that it will be a player in the commercial listing market.
David,
I agree with your assessment of it's current status.
I have no vested interest in promoting or defending them. However, with the backing of the NAR, automatic tie-in to all current CIE's plus allowance for those not part of a CIE to join and the planned enhancements, I believe it will have a significant impact.
If you click on my preview of Loopnet (and other services, including CoStar) you will see that I too have been making extensive use of other resource, as well as CofC and Economic Development sites. (They all have their strengths and weakneses, but they are an example of a major problem: no one listing service has all the available commercial listing information available in one place, so we currently have to wade through a multitude of sources.)
The article information is a summary of some of the highlights presented a couple of weeks ago in a joint presentation by the NAR and the service provider (owned by NAR). I encourage you to listen to what their vision and plans are.
Essentially, from my point of view, they are in a beta mode, with the first real phase rolling out later this month and then gradually over the next months and year.
They are now working on funneling information from all CIEs (commercial MLS's) into nationwide database and encouraging new CIEs to start where they don't exist.
It may take several years, but eventually the amount of information could potentially rival LoopNet. I believe even it not dominate, it will be significant enough that all commercial brokers will feel the need to post listings to CommercialSource in order to provide maximum market exposure and be competitive.
It IS irritating to have so many, costly, different resources for listing, searching and market data. However, the minute I learned about Commercialsource.com I uploaded my listings. It can't hurt to be the ONLY listings in my area when people start checking it out...
According to what I was told by their customer service, which at this point is providing very timely (via live online chat) responses...
A lot of cleanup of the data entry screens and new/expanded fields will be implemented over the next 90 days.
Phase One with many new enhancements will be unvieled in the later half of July, with additional updates plus Phase Two planned through October.
All registered members should be getting an announcement via email prior to changes taking effect.
Hi,
Obviously, a successful online commercial real estate database that doesn't cost the members several thousand dollars a year would be great. However, looking at the system as it currently exists, it looked fairly basic.
I'm uploading listings to CommercialSource, as well as Loopnet, CoStar, CIMLS, PropertyLine and others. It is very hard, currently, to even describe your properties, and there are very limited regional searches.
Does anyone from CommercialSource read these posts? I'd love to give input into the program.
Also, what systems are other agents currently using? What systems bring you the most leads? Loopnet vs CoStar?
Thanks!
Loren Keim
Century 21 Keim Realtors
Author - "The Fundamentals of Listing and Selling Commercial Real Estate"
I am taking advantage of inputing my commercial listings on Commercial Source. It seems to be worth the effort of taking the time to input and maintain.