In the commercial real estate as well as the real estate industry, there is a misconception from consumers and some agents that a listing broker is useless. However, the listing broker, also called a selling broker, is the one who shows the world that there is a commercial property for sale.
When building owner wants to sell their property, they are desperately looking for a broker to make their property appear on the market.
A professional listing broker has a certain set of skills that are required for the successful realization of a commercial real estate property.
Apart from negotiation skills, market knowledge, business plan, branding, and other things that a commercial real estate broker should have, there is also an important asset which is MLS or Multi Listing Service provider.
MLS is a database, a commercial real estate listing platform, and a managing tool that allows brokers to list all types of properties.
While there are a lot of well-known real estate listings such as Zillow or Trulia, there are also plenty of commercial real estate listings.
From the variety of MLS commercial listings which one should you choose? Should you list on one MLS or several and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
Have a look at commercial real estate listings comparison which will help you decide which MLS platform to choose.
CoStar Home Page
CoStar is one of the most visited commercial real estate listings. CoStar has invested over $1 billion dollars in research operations which allowed them to build a comprehensive commercial real estate database.
Their data changes 5.1 million times a day which means that the new listings keep coming, brokers keep closing the deals making clients happy.
CoStar has over 1 million monthly visitors around 95% of which are from the US, according to SimilarWeb. Such a big amount of visitors opens up a whole lot of opportunities for commercial real estate brokers to search, compare and list their property.
CoStar itself is actually a CRE software platform that helps you optimize your operations and tasks while their subsidiaries such as LoopNet, Apartments.com, BizBuySell, CityFeet, and Showcase are the MLS listings where brokers can list and promote the commercial property. Only LoopNet itself has over 6.5 million monthly visits.
However, many CoStar users at different web resources reported the inconsistency and inaccuracy of data for “such price.”
42Floors Home Page
42Floors is a free MLS commercial real estate listing that may be a good alternative to the CoStar group. 42Floors does have a premium or “elite” plan which gives extends your capabilities on the website which includes listing search and marketing campaigns within the community.
According to SimilarWeb, the estimated amount of unique monthly visitors hits 300,000+. 91% of which are coming from the United States.
At 42Floors they have free open market reports that you can download and analyze to better understand what’s going on in the industry and what’s the most trendy on their website.
Listing Rate Distribution
Being a part of AscendixRE CRM, Composer Online automatically pre-populates your template with the needed data from CRM.
Officespace Home Page
Officespace is another commercial real estate and property MLS listing. It’s free to use, and they also have an exclusive listing upgrade monthly plan for some $40. As well as 42Floors, Officespace also has downloadable market surveys.
On their About page they claim that they have 415,000 unique quarterly visitors and last month which is August 2018, they had 93,000 visitors as SimilarWeb shows.
Looking at their website from the user-experience perspective, it appears to be rather old and may not be very friendly to its visitors.
If you’re in the commercial real estate business not only the functionality of a building matter but also the appearance.
Any business is a game of appearances first. In fact, 75% of consumers admit that they judge a business’s credibility based on its website design, according to MarkBrinker.com
It appears that there are a lot of opportunities for a broker to search within the existing MLS commercial listings and databases, but only a few websites where you can actually list your property.
From the mentioned above, there are also such commercial real estate listings as cimls.com, appartmentbuildings.com, and others such as Catylist.com that allow you to add your own listings for $50 when you register.
One popular resource for borrowers and lenders is RealAtom.com.
They also have their own listings but you can’t add any. Even though the market doesn’t seem to be populated with the MLS commercial listings where brokers share their listings, brokers promote their properties anyway.
More and more brokers and agencies actively use social media groups and forums to advertise.
Another problem with those commercial MLS websites is that they do not provide you with the comprehensive managing of your listings. The only provider that does is CoStar group which may be a little bit overpriced as people say.
Listing Property Portal – MarketSpace by Ascendix
Oftentimes, brokers choose to create their own exclusive listings which they update on a regular basis.
When you manage your own listings on your own website you may face a lot of challenges with your marketing campaigns, monitoring, reporting, and effective communication with your clients and it will take quite some time to keep your data up-to-date.
In fact, proper management of your business campaigns, deals, and clients is one of the most important things that help you establish better relationships with your clients and other brokers.
Ascendix has a solution. We can add property listings functionality to your website and automate content management by integrating it with your CRM system.
Why having a CRM integrated into the commercial listing website is a must-have?
It’s not a must-have, however, here is what you can do with our solution:
Our commercial real estate property listings solution helps you automate the routine process and saves you tons of time and effort.
If you need a consultation about choosing the best commercial real estate listing platform or want to share your experience, feel free to contact us, read our blog posts, and leave comments in the section below.
We are a team of CRM consultants, developers, data analysts from the United States and Europe. Since 1996, we've been helping companies make the most out of CRM software and improve their software systems.
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