07-01-2009
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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06-18-2009
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 You can now find links to search for “Expired” or “Withdrawn” listings on the “Comparables” search tab of any of our local CIEs.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.
05-19-2009
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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04-29-2009
We’ll have a booth at both of these upcoming events:
NAR Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo
Washington DC, May 13-15
Catylist Booth #425
ICSC: RECON
Las Vegas, May 17-20
Catylist Booth #2066
Stop by the booth to find out how we can help your company, or your local association…
- Find out why we’re the #1 REALTOR®-Operated CIE provider in the country. Discuss the difference between our marketing and research platforms.
- Let us demo our next generation scenario-based search engine, including integrated demographics, market stats and advanced mapping.
- Let us show you how easy it is for members to send e-brochures to 130,000+ recipients, power their company websites without redundant entry, integrate a CRM database, and order customized marketing to promote their company or listings.
- Check out our distribution partners. Members enter listings one time and they can publish them on more than 40 websites including the local CIE, Google, Commercial IQ, Commercial Source, 35+ local Catylist sites, Vast, Lycos, CIMLS, RE Business Online and more.
- Learn how Catylist CIEs connect directly with the business community by partnering with local and state EDCs to power their websites at NO cost to the Association.
- See how members are maximizing listing exposure by syndicating their data on local newspaper and publication websites at NO cost to the Association.
04-13-2009
More good news!
The REALTORS® Commercial Alliance of Massachusetts, NAR’s newest Commercial Association, recently chose Catylist to power a Commercial Information Exchange (CIE) for their commercial members. The CIE will serve as the source for commercial real estate throughout the entire state of Massachusetts.
Martin Kane of King & Newton Commercial Real Estate, CIE Task Force Chair, said, “The REALTORS® Commercial Alliance of Massachusetts is excited that Catylist will serve as our CIE provider. We reviewed the latest available national CIE options and it is clear the Catylist CIE service is head-and-shoulders above any other available service. Catylist CIE offers marketing efficiencies on a property-centric service that connects member listings to multiple other sites, including Commercial IQ, Google, REBusinessOnline, Commercial Source, CIMLS, and many others. We are also impressed with Catylist’s responsiveness and their commitment to staying at the forefront of the evolving technology curve.”
We’ll be launching the site this Spring.
Learn more about how a Commercial Information Exchange can benefit your local community.
04-13-2009
We helped the Greater Baton Rouge Association of REALTORS® develop the Louisiana Commercial Database in 2003. It now contains over 5,500 commercial listings for sale or lease throughout the state and is used to search and market commercial property by nearly 700 professionals including most of the largest brokerage firms in Louisiana.
“LACDB is proud to renew its service with Catylist for another 3-year term,” said Barry Spizer, CCIM, LACDB Immediate Past Chair. “We looked at other available service providers in the market, but it was obvious Catylist offers superior technology on a user-friendly platform. From the search engine, market stats, demographics, listing analytics and the new Market Monitor feature, Catylist offers the best CIE service available today… period.”
Learn more about how a Commercial Information Exchange can benefit your local community.
03-02-2009
While referring to present-day as the “Internet Age” might conjure images of cavemen trading in their clubs for keyboards, this article in the March issue of REALTOR magazine has some interesting ideas for commercial real estate professionals: Marketing Your Listings in the Internet Age
“I now consider CIEs just another cost of doing business,” says Jason Hart, principal of San Luis Obispo, California–based Hart Commercial Real Estate, a company that sells and leases commercial properties. “It’s like putting a For Sale or For Rent sign on the Internet.”
These days, most commercial professionals should agree with Mr. Hart. The Internet has become the largest and most powerful marketing tool when listing a commercial property.
“Compared with residential multiple listing services where everyone uses the same database, commercial listing services are highly fragmented by property type and location,” says Bob Gibbons, who subscribes to several CIEs. “You have to put your listings everywhere you think they can be seen.”
We hear the same comments everyday and have been working hard to find a solution to the problem. Our goal with Commercial IQ is to simplify the process into two steps:
- Build a killer listing presentation — Add as much information as you want and upload an unlimited number of photos, maps, plans, video and other documentation to help searchers learn more about the property. We augment your listing automatically with demographic data, market statistics, and aerial imagery.
- Send it everywhere — It’s a lot of work to build the perfect presentation and you shouldn’t have to repeat the task a dozen times. In addition to exposure on Commercial IQ, we automatically distribute your listing to dozens of sites, including CommercialSource.com, CIMLS, Vast, Oodle, GoogleBase, 35+ local CIEs and 20+ economic development sites. You can even display it on your company website with our SiteLink product.
The commercial real estate industry has a ways to go, but things are always evolving. Give Commercial IQ a try — registration is free.
02-25-2009
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.
02-18-2009
After working with us for the past several years to grow a CIE in Michigan, Nancy McKellar has come on board to help our other markets achieve the same success. Welcome aboard, Nancy!
Nancy McKellar – Vice President, Regional Sales
Nancy was hired by Michigan’s Commercial Board of REALTORS® (CBOR) in 2004 as the executive director of CPIX.net, a statewide CIE, which she helped establish. In 2006, she became the executive vice president for the statewide CBOR. She continues to retain these positions. Nancy is also responsible for all planning aspects of Synergy, Michigan’s largest commercial real estate industry annual convention. Nancy speaks and trains nationally regarding establishing and growing CIEs and is approved by the state of Michigan to teach commercial real estate continuing education courses. She’ll be in charge of our markets in the Northeast region, including Ohio, Indiana, New York, and Michigan.
If you’re interested in working at Catylist, we’re always looking for great people.
02-17-2009
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
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