Commercial IQ Blog: SiteLink

Catylist Fall Software Improvements

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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.

Catylist Summer Software Improvements

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.

Chicago CDB Property Search

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:

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.

Steinborn/TCN Switches to SiteLink

Las Cruces, NM - Steinborn/TCN Commercial Real Estate recently switched to SiteLink, developed by Catylist Inc, to power the listing database portion of their website, www.steinborn.com.

According to Steinborn’s owner/broker, John L. Hummer, CCIM, “We made the switch from LoopNet to Catylist based on a thorough review of the quality and efficiency of the Catylist Network. Their system is extremely user friendly and provides us with a solid platform to effectively market our growing list of commercial properties. In addition to the quality of their network, the level of customer service from the Catylist team was outstanding. We highly recommend Catylist.”

Users searching for property to buy or lease on the Steinborn website can easily create reports & brochures, view maps & photos, multi-media files, and connect with associates.

By choosing SiteLink technology, the information is also published on Catylist?s national website, www.catylist.com as well as for the members of nearly 40 local Commercial Information Exchanges (CIEs) located across the country, providing maximum exposure for their clients.

About Steinborn/TCN:

Steinborn/TCN Commercial Division is part of Steinborn, Inc. Realtors, southern New Mexico’s largest and most successful full service real estate brokerage firm. Steinborn TCN focuses on all aspects of retail, medical, office, industrial sales, leasing and management services. The company is affiliated with the TCN Worldwide Commercial Network.