Rofo connections is built right into your Rofo account. You simply sign in to Rofo, click the connections tab, and view chronological updates from your network. Likewise, your connections can easily view your most recent updates. Could be an updated listing, a recent tour, a completed deal, project or a piece of local news. You decide what you want to share and how much detail you want to provide. And it integrates with Twitter and Linkedin – update once and done. The idea is that it gives you and your network an organized view of the latest activity and hopefully reduces the size of your email inbox.



Here’s some background on the issues we’re taking on:

It’s been a few years since I was immersed in the day to day of real estate brokerage. 2007 was the last year I brokered office and lab space requirements in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I started Rofo in 2008 my thinking wasn’t that the industry is broken and ripe for the proverbial disruption. Rather, the industry was inefficient and needed to be organized. Here are some examples (certainly there’s more):

1) The pdf blast – a broker in our market would get a new listing, make a pdf, and email blast it. I think I got about 20 of these per day. Scan and delete.

2) Deals in the market – we’d each spend a lot of our time calling around and trying to get information about who was touring, what they toured, the size of the requirement, etc. The issue was that the broker who had the requirement didn’t have an effective way of sharing what they were working on with many people. Same was true for announcing completed deals (not talking about sharing comps).

3) The broker requirements email blast – This was the solution to number 2 and only as good as your targeted email list. Would receive maybe 10 per day. Those would get deleted (how exactly would you organize this in email). 4 weeks would pass and you’d have an idea for one those requirements but you couldn’t remember who had it.

Numbers 1 to 3 is just the inbound stuff. There’s also the stuff I was generating.

4) My pdf email blast – I’d get a new listing (or a new suite would open up). I’d organize all the info and give it to our marketing assistant (who had a tiny marketing budget and supported 6 active brokers, managed the website, PR, advertising, inputted comps, produced tour books, dealt with lunch, you get my point). We’d finally do an email blast of the space. That email would get deleted.

5) My requirements – I would tour a requirement and want to get the word out to other brokers and landlords.

6) My deals – I would complete a deal and want to get the word out to other brokers and landlords.

7) Prospecting – I almost forgot. For items 4 through 7, I needed to get that info out to prospective and past clients (and that was before before Twitter and Linkedin).

Assuming your network consists of 100 brokers and 300 clients (lumping together landlords and tenants so that number is probably bigger). That is a ton of information to circulate and track. And no one wants to be the spammer.

Rofo connections is free to use. Just register or sign in to your Rofo account.