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CoStar Vs. Loopnet and the release of the CoStar Real-Time Map of Commercial Real Estate

Mike Fitzgerald — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:47:51 +0000

CoStar just launched a nifty little mashup showing all searches, property listings and comparable sales records on their website as they are created in real time. I once saw something similar at the Metrobrokers office in Atlanta. I thought to myself wow this is neat but what real use does it have other than drawing some attention to its creator. It’s really more of a marketing gimmick than a useful analytical tool, but I’d like to hear your comments.

CoStar and Loopnet have been in a heated contest for market share. CoStar is the established commercial real estate data provider with products that track sale and lease transactions, market research data, as well as provide leads on tenants that may have a lease up for renewal. Loopnet entered the market in the late 90’s almost 2 decades after CoStar. Loopnet has only recently added products that track comparable sales and provide market research data. From the beginning, Loopnet was a listing service and it has grown quickly by providing web visitors what they want most: property listings.

Until this Spring, CoStar only allowed paid members to search their database of listings, comps, and leases. Loopnet has always allowed free searches of premium property listing ads. CoStar’s argument for the longest time was that Loopnet would one day cut out brokers by allowing principals to have direct access to the holy grail of commercial real estate — the listings. Whether or not CoStar is correct is a topic for another post.

CoStar finally relented and opened their for lease and for sale listings to the public to search for free. Only the premium listings and some random sampling of the non-premium listings are displayed. CoStar is in the process of up-selling premium listings to their existing broker subscriber base and currently don’t appear to have enough premium listings for most searches to provide useful results. This is whey they include a random sampling of basic listings in the free search. Paid searchers see all properies premium and basic.

Earlier this year, Loopnet issued a press release claiming it’s traffic was 9.9 times greater than that of costar.com. Compete.com is showing Loopnet has a strong lead by not quite the 10 fold lead of earlier this year. I expect, CoStar will gain on Loopnet in the coming months by virtue of the fact they have opened their data up to public search. The surprise in the Compete comparison is Catylist.com. This site is working closely with the national realtors trade group and may become the commercial equivalent of REALOR.com on the residential side of the business.

Real Estate: A Cyclical Business

Mike Fitzgerald — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:03:49 +0000

Any broker worth his salt will tell you that real estate runs in cycles. It’s a well known fact that residential home sales peak in the summer months when families try to move while the kids are out of school. The commercial cycle is a little more difficult to relate to since so many property types make up commercial sales including apartments, warehouses, shopping centers, offices, and undeveloped land. Below is a chart for Loopnet.com’s traffic for the past 2+ years. It shows that activity picks up in the Spring and Fall each year and declines in the summer and winter. I have some of my own theories about why this is true, but I would like to hear what you think. Please post your ideas in the comment section below.

Alternately, the graph below shows traffic on the largest residential real estate website, REALTOR.com. Traffic peaks at the end of the summer and bottoms out around the 1st of the year.

Creating a Real Estate Blog

Mike Fitzgerald — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:04:29 +0000

I’ve toyed around with blogger.com and the most popular real estate blog at activerain.com. With both sites, I was ready to post blogs in a matter of minutes and the sites claimed to bring a ready pool of readers to my posts. Activerain’s blog highlighted my first post on their main page and over 30 comments followed mostly from members looking to get Activerain points by leaving a comment. The blogger.com site was even easier to set up but no one ever saw it as far as I could tell.

Both blogs included advertisements and Activerain even added a feature to search for property, but the search promoted my competitor. I discovered that I was basically creating free content for these sites which helped them sell ads and drive visitors away from my blog.

I had heard a lot about wordpress, but was afraid it would be too difficult to install and setup on my website. I was pleasantly surprised when the setup took only 15 minutes and my web hosting company even had an online tutorial . Wordpress.com claims you can install in 5 minutes and provides their own instructions on how to do so. My install took a little longer because of some extra steps my web hosting company required.

The Fitzgerald Realty blog at Activerain is still up and I guess it will remain there unless they start putting links to my competitors directly on my blog posts!

P.S. I started adding posts to localism.com but didn’t really get any response. No ads on that site but I believe the goal is to build content for each community and then sell rights to moderate the posts to that community to a local realtor in each city.