LoopNet Alternative

General Real Estate Investing
1

Hi everyone.

I’m primarily an internet entrepreneur. But I have a strong interest in commercial real estate investing… but I have yet to take my first plunge yet.

I have a question for my fellow commercial RE investors here. I’ve noticed L00pnet and CoStar are both kinda clunky. (i.e. developed in the ancient ages of internet … i.e. 1999 or so) I was thinking of creating a web 2.0 type of L00pnet … stuff that I look for personally.

So on my site, I would create a tool for investors to

  1. discuss a particular deal w/other fellow investors… or better yet, look for equity partners

  2. not have to download PDF to view it (there are ways to view on the browser w/having to download the PDF or the acrobat reader)

  3. do some auto calculations for the investor ( IRR, CCR, ROI, etc) on the fly so the he/she doesn’t have to manually do them

  4. submit deals online (well, at least LOI) and leave vmail for the broker online

  5. display geographical data (i.e. income, age, sex, etc. of people living near apt xyz) as a picture as opposed to doing it in text

  6. alert/notification for newly posted deals depending on investor criteria… etc…

  7. More extensive info for brokers (kind of like… LinkedIn profile for brokers)

Most of all… it would be FREE!!! None of that monthly subscription BS.

These are things I would find useful myself.

What do you think?

2

You have some good ideas…but taking marketshare from those sites isn’t going to be easy at all.

3

Like Rich said, it is not easy to be a late comer and take the same market share from established sites. Many tried to implement a better yahoo, ebay, search engines,…etc. and never took off.

From the list you provided, I really don’t care about all that. I just want to see pictures of the property and the numbers. You cannot force seller agent or seller to disclose the numbers, at least the correct numbers. If I feel it might be a good deal I would call the seller or his agent.

Now, one way you may want to approach this is to try to sell it to the board of realtors. NAR does not have a good system for commercial listings, so at least some of the local ones may be interested in licensing your system. But again, they will look for solid system and you will need marketing and marketing budget.