Floorplanning the easy way

Do you or your clients have a difficult time envisioning how a vacant office suite would layout? Commercial real estate just isn’t staged the way residential listings usually are; so, unless your full-time job is CRE, many times this can be a struggle. Rather than sitting through napkin sketching meetings, check out Floorplanner. Floorplanner is the easiest and best-looking way to create and share interactive floorplans online. Whether you’re moving into a new house, planning a wedding or reorga…

Easier Email Signatures

Adding signatures to email can be a real chore. Sometimes you can’t use images, or if you can, they’re not embedded and end up as attachments. And links to your social networks – forget about it! Some of the problems can be solved with “advanced” methods requiring some HTML knowledge. But if you’re frustrated with your email software’s signature options, give AirTime for Email a try. You’ll not only be able to create a good looking signature file but track clicks, target signatures by location o…

Rofo’s New Listing Widget

Rofo.com just rolled out its new Listings Widget. It is slick, clean and simple to implement. From Rofo’s announcement: We’re excited to unveil a new (and easier way) for commercial real estate brokers, agents, property managers and landlords to present available listings on their own website. The Rofo listings widget (please help us come up with a better name) is: FREE SCALABLE FLEXIBLE CUSTOMIZABLE And it’s easy to use. It’s packed with functionality, easy on the eyes, simplifies data manageme…

Now maybe its LinkedIn’s turn to become the next MySpace

Kwelia: Multifamily Rental Rate Visualization

  Rental Rate bar charts are soooo 2001. Ugh, and just when you were getting the hang of creating them in Excel…. Kwelia is a web-based application which uses heat mapping to visualize apartment rental rates. How it works: Big Data Through professional relationships and bleeding-edge technology, we are constantly collecting continuous streams of rental market data points. We take pride in our ability to always be on top of what’s going on in them. Quantitative Analysis Using techniques b…

Can video kill the email star?

In 1981, MTV debuted its first music video: the Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star”¹. A recent twitter rant and followup blog post titled “Why I Hate Email CRE Marketing and Why it Won’t Stop” by Coy Davidson got me thinking… How can we, as a small group of progressive tech aficionados, convince the mainstream commercial real estate broker that there are more effective methods to marketing a property than mass email. In other words, how can we use new technology to kill off the old? First, i…

Move over big data, here comes the “content is king” wave!

Motionloft: Google Analytics for Sidewalks

For another incredible example of the HUGE potential data visualization has for commercial real estate, check out Motionloft, if you haven’t already. Demographic and traffic information which gets updated once a year by your friendly DOT and US Census Bureau is now obsolete. Motionloft provides “real-world analytics”,  similar to what Google Analytics provides for websites. A couple examples: Motionloft provides value across just about all of the CRE-industry covering the real world analytics…

YET ANOTHER COOL SITE TO CHECK OUT – RetailMLS.com

NYU’s Schack Institute: Big data can turn real estate industry on its head

As my CRE data visualization soap box theme continues, at an NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate Sustainable Real Estate Conference, several panelists made some great observations. The growing volume of data generated within cities presents an unprecedented opportunity for the real estate industry to better segment markets and products, target policies and investment, and capture value clouded by information asymmetries. When coupled with an understanding of human behavior and evidence-based dec…