You’ve used CoStar and LoopNet. And that’s worked out pretty well for you. They’ve got the data, and you pay the whatever they ask for it, even if not all of it’s right. What else can you do?
“Researched listings” does not mean accurate listings, and there are many reasons for that. Researched listings get just as stale as the listings the brokerages enter. It’s just as much the brokerage community’s fault as CoStar’s. Is there another solution?
What if you were part of a network of peers, and your peer group were the ones nudging you to keep your information fresh? What if you had a way to keep private notes on the listings during conversations with your colleagues, so at least your information is right?
What if you didn’t have to pay if all you want to do is search for listings? What if you didn’t have to pay more money to post more listings? What if your listing service helped you share your listings to social media? What if your listing service was in fact a service?
What if your listing service didn’t build the cost of economists and journalists into its service? You know you can get that information for free from the internet.
Creating new habits is not an easy process. And you need the information you need. You should not get rid of your existing listing service until you are comfortable that its replacement has the information that you need. But the status quo need not remain stagnant.
Once, CoStar and LoopNet were the avant garde. Now they’ve settled into a comfortable, complacent, entitled middle age. The commercial real estate industry can choose to stick with the status quo or to support an avant garde, that respects the past but understands the future.
You have choices. There’s @QuantumListing of course, there’s also others. @SharpLaunch put together a good list which you can find here: https://www.sharplaunch.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-commercial-real-estate-listing-sites/ ….
Obviously, I want you to try http://QuantumListing.com . The more people that use it, the more listings it has, the more useful it becomes. This will take a community effort. Marketing alone won’t solve this, nor will throwing tons of seed, angel, and vc money.
The success of any new player is going to depend on word of mouth. A peer’s recommendation is worth dozens of ads or email blasts. My vision is to have as lean an organization as possible so that we can keep our price as low as possible.
My father was in the supermarket business, and his way of doing business was to treat customers with respect, and create a great value proposition by giving your customers the best possible price and making your money by doing a high volume. That’s the cloth from which I was cut.
That’s the model on which QuantumListing is based. My customers can’t believe it when they find out that they can post an unlimited number of listings for the same price. I have one customer with over 250 listings. He pays just $79.99/year.
The Enterprise membership membership is meant for an office with multiple brokers and unlimited listings, and that’s just $899.99/year. We’ll be soon be offering a network feature for commercial broker associations/networks and multi-office companies.
We’re also working on integrations with other online services and platforms, working toward an open source ideal where you can put together an integrated bundle of services that work the way you do. All this will take time. QuantumListing today is at point of departure.
We’re embarking on an incredible adventure, one that will only be better if you are on it with us.
(The preceding post was a recreation of a Twitter Moment. Here is the original Moment.)
The Status Quo, the Avant Garde, or Both?
Photography courtesy of: Kari Shea
