There’s a very basic challenge in performing an online search for commercial real estate that is unique to commercial real estate: neighborhoods and zip codes.

The industry has submarkets. Consumers (or occupants) know neighborhoods. Consumers and the industry don’t think in terms of zip codes. Downtown San Francisco (I use this example because we rent there) is the Financial District, the North Financial District, the South Financial District, North of Market, Embarcadero, etc. Getting all of this to match up and provide for a meaningful search, no matter what you call it, is no easy data task. On top of that most consumers (myself included) have little patience in refining/redoing their searches before they bounce. The polygon search thing is a cool feature but how big should my polygon be? I don’t want to miss something just outside my border.

We have a new solution and will be rolling it out to our site in the coming weeks. For now, it’s available here to preview. Its still in Beta so go easy on us. This is currently set up to search buildings (not active listings, comps, tenant requirements, announcements, active tours/brokers). The thing to try is the map and the search box. Type in an address, cross street, neighborhood. Or just click on the map.

Look forward to your feedback.

This morning we released an enhanced version of Rofo Pro. Its the first affordable cloud-based property listing management system designed by and for commercial real estate professionals. With Rofo Pro you can say goodbye to:

MS Word and Excel for storing and managing your active listings
Your designer
Your website consultant
Your wasted time spent on the same weekly/monthly listing updating tasks

And say hello to:

Owning and controlling your data
Photo storage and Video
A single point of data entry for listings
Listings that automatically integrate with your website/blog
Simple clean design
Integrated social media and mobile apps
Inclusion in largest community of active tenants
An automated posting solution for Craigslist

Below is a sample of our property listings “white label” which can be easily added and customized for any website. If you’d like more info, pricing, etc please contact us anytime.

We’ve made some significant changes and improvements to Real Estate Pro – our real estate app for LinkedIn. With 8 months of great product feedback, thousands of new users each month, and a very engaged professional audience we’re excited to announce and highlight some key new features/improvements.

Making it even easier to add real estate listings

Everything is now self-contained within the app. No longer do you need to leave LinkedIn to add, edit or delete your listings. Simply click on ‘Add Listing’ and input the basic information about the listing you are marketing. Hit ‘next’, upload a photo, and then click ‘feature on profile page’. Now your listing will appear on your profile page and, more importantly, your professional network will see your update and stay informed of your professional activity. In a profession that relies so heavily on networking and referrals the benefits are immediate and tangible.

Add an image

Feature on profile page

The process is similar for building your resume of completed deals/transactions

Select ‘Add a deal’ and input the highlights of your completed work and your expertise.

Data feeds

We now also offer various xml and excel feed formats for brokerage firms who want to simplify the data input for their professionals. Our feeds support any listing type. We also now support a ‘transaction feed’ for brokerage firms to promote and announce completed sale and lease transactions.

International listings – we’re almost there!

We’ve seen a tremendous amount of international demand given LinkedIn’s worldwide members – now in excess of 100 million with incredible international growth. We’re working hard on an updated version of the app to support real estate professionals outside of the US. We hope to announce international support in the second quarter along with some early international partners so stay tuned…

Many thanks again to our early partners like Cushman & Wakefield, CBC Worldwide, Regus and Hines and the thousands of real estate professionals who have had an important voice in improving our app.

We’d love to get your feedback too. The app is FREE to use, takes 2 seconds to install, and is found here on LinkedIn.

Yesterday we made some slight changes to our Linkedin app Real Estate Pro. We first launched the free app in July 2010. Since that time we’ve seen significant use of the app by both commercial and residential real estate agents/brokers on Linkedin. Professionals are using the app as a way to notify their professional network of current listings and completed transactions. As listings and completed transactions are featured on the app, network updates are sent to your professional connections. The basic idea is that 80 to 90% of an agent’s business come from referrals and Linkedin is the social network of choice to keep in touch with your professional contacts.

Free Listings That Will Not Expire

Real Estate Pro for Linkedin is a free app. There’s no limit to the number of property listings you can add to Linkedin. And if your brokerage firm is feeding listings to Rofo, you just simply need to link your Rofo account to Linkedin. Your broker’s data feed will keep your listings updated automatically. If you are manually adding listings to Linkedin we’ve increased the length of time your listings remain active. Originally this was 30 days. But given the fact that many listings remain active for much longer these days, you have full control over a listing expiration (read: you delete it when its no longer active).

Before it Was Free. And Now it is Free!

In the past, when adding listings to Linkedin, users we’re prompted to upgrade to a Rofo Pro account at the end of the listing process. This was confusing to users so we’ve changed our add a listing process. The page flow has been changed. Now, when you click to add a listing from within the app, you go through a very fast input form and you’re done.

Stay tuned for some other upcoming announcements related to the app. In the mean time, keep the feedback coming for more product needs and improvements.

We rolled out a new look and highlighted new features today for our commercial real estate listing pages. When we’re considering product updates/redesign we usually do five things:

1- Listen to our users
2- Think about the features we want (since we do eat our own dogfood so to speak)
3- Look at related industries and see who has just nailed it as far as usability
4- Use other websites in our space and see what isn’t working (I’m not naming names)
5- Listen to our users some more

The image shows a couple of changes (click here or on the image to see more details).

Here’s a quick rundown on the changes and why we did it:

1- Feature the map and reviews from Yelp: our old listing pages featured the interior/building photo of the office space. The problem is that a large percentage of listings do not have photos. So we decided to feature something in this space that we can always deliver (a map, a street view of the building, and reviews from Yelp about nearby amenities that are important to a business).

2- Reviews: we had this feature before but it was buried. It’s now more prominently featured because the users who could find it before really liked it. Keep your eye out for another upcoming product announcement related to office space/building reviews – we like this feature a lot and plan to do a lot more with it.

3- Similar listings: we finally rolled out the original Amazon concept of “people who viewed this also liked this”. We’ve been talking about this feature since the beginning. Really glad we finally got to it. We have some more ideas around this including the ability to see the most popular spaces/buildings based on company type.

Stay tuned for some more announcements relating to the product as well as some big partnership announcements. And keep sending us your feedback (positive and negative welcome).

We’ve continue to accumulate a lot of good product feedback/ideas and, today, we’re pleased to introduce our new and improved search page. A lot of the changes are subtle but significant. We had a few goals/requirements with this update:

1) simplify the design: we eliminated some under utilized features
2) better highlight key search filters: these are the most important criteria for a business searching for space
3) improve results: the search is now blazing fast and we show the most recently added/updated content FIRST.

Here’s a screen shot for Phoenix office space for rent that highlights the changes:

The ability to do a radius search from your home address and/or current office space was somewhat of a hidden feature before. We’ve now added it as a key search filter.

We’re adding some great new features in the coming weeks which we’ll be announcing. As always, keep sending us your product feedback and thanks for using Rofo.

Alan

Our mission at Rofo is to simplify the process we all go through to find the right real estate listing and/or connect with the right estate agent or broker to help us out. We do this on Rofo.com with some powerful and unique free tools and have extended that functionality to other platforms and devices like our augmented reality mobile app.

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of our Linkedin app, Real Estate Pro, which blends our real estate search tools and content (the peanut butter) with the Linkedin platform (the chocolate). If you think about it, the process you go through to find real estate, no matter if its residential or commercial space, is social. Beyond your online and offline search, you end up networking with many people (friends, business contacts, and professionals) before eventually connecting with the right agents and the right place. We hear this from our customers and our friends and we’ve experienced it ourselves.

Our solution with Linkedin is simple: give every user of Linkedin a local and social view of their real estate market. Seeing listings is one thing. Seeing who has the listings, how you’re connected to them, and which pro’s are the most active and relevant to your needs is powerful and efficient.

Whether you’re searching for real estate or marketing listings and your expertise, this 2 minute video will give you a quick idea of what you can do with Real Estate Pro:

We hope you enjoy and welcome your feedback.

All of us have that ideal building in mind of where we’d like to locate our business. Could be the location, the character, or the other tenants. Maybe you’ve worked in that building before. Or maybe the office rent is known to be downright cheap. There’s a little known feature on our site called building search that lets you keep tabs on that specific building and check for availability.

Building pages on Rofo help you decide if a space is right for your business. Building pages, such as the Oregon Trail Building below, feature available office spaces for lease within the building, photographs, area maps and a building description.

Start your Building Search today and find the next space for your business.

No matter what city your business is based in we know that choosing the right office location involves surrounding amenities.

When looking at a listing on Rofo.com, such as the San Francisco – Downtown Stevenson Street – Class A Space below, you can select to see nearby amenities on the map. View local amenities and Yelp Reviews of nearby restaurants, coffee shops, banks, parking facilities and post office locations on the map of each listing detail page on Rofo.com.

If you’ve ever searched for office space you know the painful experience of walking/driving around calling on generic ‘for lease’ signs. You end up calling on 20,000 square foot spaces for your 8 person company. You probably also know that not all available spaces even get a sign on a building (certainly not the sublease space or shared spaces). Well, we think we’ve found a solution to your problem.

Rofo has partnered with Junaio, a new mobile augmented reality platform. And together we have created the first commercial real estate augmented reality mobile application. The free junaio app is currently available for your iPhone 3GS and will soon be available for Android users.

How does it work and what exactly is Augmented Reality?

Simply put, Augmented Reality brings real world objects to life through your mobile device. 

Once you download the free app, search for Rofo and subscribe to our channel and you’re ready to go. When looking for an office space, retail location or warehouse for rent, point the camera on your mobile phone at an appealing office building or city block. If there are available commercial spaces icons will appear on your screen. With just a tap of the finger you can now explore properties, email listing brokers, see interior photos, find the exact square footage and price and get directions. All from your mobile phone.

This video quickly shows you how it works:

Here’s a quick recap of the Rofo Channel Features:

• Browse nearby spaces within a specified radius
• View listing details including; photos, price and size of the space
• Email the listing broker or landlord
• Get directions to a listing using Google maps

To access the Rofo Channel download the junaio app on your mobile phone. The junaio application is available for free on the iPhone 3GS.

Good luck with your search and please give us your feedback.