This is our first blog post/product announcement for 2012. So a delayed Happy New Year to you all! Hopefully the commercial estate industry will continue to improve in 2012 and build from CRE momentum we saw in Q4 2011.

Rofo has introduced many improvements and changes to the site over the past few weeks. Most notably we improved the navigation and ease of search. Our original design allowed for basic search based on cities and states. That’s an easy way to organize commercial listings data but not really how users want to conduct a search. I may want to search by intersection, neighborhood, current address, landmark. Well, now you can. We also stuck the search bar in the header of the site so you can easily perform a new search from any landing page.

The second major upgrade has been to our search results pages. This is perhaps getting too detailed but now a search for 5500 Stewart Ave. in Fremont will take you to all of the other listings and tenant requirements nearby in Fremont.

Lastly, related to search, is a new option for agents and brokerage firms to promote their brand. We’re pleased to announce some recent work we completed with NAI Kilpatrick. All of their listings are branded and all of their brokers can display branded listings and updates on their Linkedin profiles. Linkedin usage by the commercial real estate industry has really taken off and we’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest and installations of our app (the app puts your listings on your Linkedin profile page).

We’re unveiling some other major upgrades this week and next which will greatly enhance how commercial real estate brokers can further promote their expertise and activity.

As always, we welcome and appreciate the feedback and ideas for improvement.

-Alan