42Floors (YC W12) Launches Commercial Real Estate Search Tool
betakit.com
betakit.com
and the investors are mostly tech guys, not real estate guys...which means there is no inside track into getting a meeting with heads of "big office corp"
so they'll most likely hit adoption issues outside of the bay area.
plus there are a dozen sites doing that, and besides the fancy UI, there is no real advantage over the other sites. And speaking of UI, that site is too javascript extensive....takes way too long to load
also the $/sqft per year seems a bit useless...at the very least should provide how much it'd actually cost per month.
finally the SEO on the site is terrible...you are trying to rank for "find office space" that gets 170 searches per month, when you should be trying to rank for "office space for rent" which gets 4400 searches per month...also lease should be somewhere in the title, since that's also getting searched for.
don't get me wrong, chances are they'll have some limited success in the Bay Area based on the YC referalls alone. But they'll have to deal with a major chicken and egg problem elsewhere...and as you can see, the search volume is pretty low, so they'll need to go offline to actually reach their target customer.
Exactly. CRE is slightly a different kind of animal.
On your product feedback—yes to all of it. We'll improve cost/month, SEO, and load times (along with the 148 other tickets on our wish list).
On your adoption points, all I can say is yes it will be difficult and I think you've done a good job focusing on the toughest challenges. Big challenges=big rewards; we're willing to take that risk.
The part I would push back on the hardest is our team. I believe an engineer-centric company will win in this space. Our advisors and investors are helping us with high-level introductions. We can get in the door anywhere, but in the end the product matters and we pride ourselves in building valuable products quickly. Some other companies in our industry pride themselves on being 'built for brokers, by brokers.'
When competing on the web, I'll bet on hackers any day.
As far as I know - this is how most people look at commercial real estate costs. At least in my talks with people here in SF who were looking for, and leasing space.
Personally I find both sites irritating, so I'm sure there is an opening here, but I'd love to hear what he thinks it is.
Click through to the link, ctrl/cmd+F "loopnet" / "costar" ... see what he thinks.
The article also mentions: this is not for commercial property, just leasable spaces, which is another differentiator between those giants.
It's also how residential search existed 7 years ago. There were MLS systems that were mostly just used by realtors to keep track of availabilities. Zillow, Trulia, and Streeteasy liberated all that fragmented data into usable search experiences.
We're 'liberating commercial real estate data.' Which means, anyone can search for free. Once the data is freely available, then companies everywhere can compete for traffic with user experience, customer service, value-added features,etc—all the things you as a customer want these companies to be competing on.
In a world where data is still subscription based, companies compete with lock-in contracts and exclusivity clauses and nobody wins. For proof, check out the design of the big incumbents. It's more than just bad, it's not caring.
We may win, we may not. But we believe that within the next 5 years, the internet will have its usual effect on commercial real estate. And we welcome it for no other reason then we also need to search for office space.
Do some keyword research too, like the other dude said, mucho importante.
Nice looking site, though!
As a founder of a similar business (residential rather than commercial), and YC interviewee in the same round as you, I would be interested how you plan to tackle the problem you state on your blog:
I did my best to search myself online and it's almost impossible.
It is incredible. Craigslist is almost totally filled with spaces
that are off the market, put up by brokers simply trying to get
you to call (it's called a flytrap).
Congrats once again!
I'd really like to be able to "click into" the actual Streetview to be able to rotate around on a listing page. It looks like the auto-grabbed images aren't always the most useful representation. Also -- I immediately found the two Google Maps images on the listing page to be kind of an eye sore with each having the Google logo and trademark.
Best of luck to ya'll, the site is off to a pretty awesome start.
Not knowing the logistics, maybe that's just too sticky an idea. Either way, it looks damn useful, especially with that in-house photographers part. CL photos are SKETCH.
The only thing I'd do differently is allow users to zoom in/out on the map using the mouse scroll. I know this is default behavior on most map products, so when I went to zoom and my scroll button did nothing ... it was a little counter-intuitive.
That's a very minor issue however, and this is a great product overall.
Best of luck. You guys definitely have a nice interface.