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.

You’ve just spent months searching for an office space to rent for your company. You finally decide on a location and then ask the landlord/broker/property manager “can you recommend a telecom vendor who services this building”. If it were only that easy. We just experienced this headache and thought we’d pass along some helpful advice:

Timing: How quickly you need service is going to drive a lot of decisions. When we moved earlier this year the whole process was fast tracked with just 3 weeks from lease signing to move-in. Budget constraints and bandwidth requirements were important, but the deal breaker was having service on move-in day. To meet our deadlines, we started by asking our landlord for a list of telecom providers who were already authorized to service the building and were in a position to get to work quickly. We were interested in a dedicated circuit (like a T-1), but almost all providers indicated a minimum 4 week lead-time, so we looked for a short term solution. The simplest move for us was to get basic phone lines and DSL service from our local phone company AT&T. The DSL was installed within 10 days and we had a solution for day one and an in expensive back up solution going forward.

Type of internet service: Fast speeds can be had through a number of different options including inexpensive alternatives like DSL, Cable, and some new Fiber Optic services. If you are looking for guaranteed upload and download speeds with service level agreements, you are probably looking for a dedicated circuit. Dedicated circuits start at higher price point (usually north of $400/mo) and often require a long term contract, but they are the solution of choice for businesses where internet is mission critical.

Type of phone system: We decided to explore a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system which offered us a few key benefits. First off we could avoid an investment in a PBX and instead pay a monthly fee for a full featured business phone (the price is in neighborhood of $30 per phone including voice mail and all the bells and whistles). VoIP phones also offered some flexibility for us in terms of growth – plugging in a new phone for a new employee is simple and does not require a technician visit. The VoIP features are great, but we have discovered that we have lost some of the reliability of a traditional phone line, and our initial experiment using VoIP phones connected to our DSL proved unsatisfactory. We ultimately decided to order VoIP service from SpeakEasy who also provides our T-1 connection – we now have one party controlling the quality of the service and that seems to have made a difference.

So the short answer to “can you recommend a telecom vendor” is: “it really depends”. Drop us a line if you have any questions or want even more specific advice. There’s no reason to keep reinventing this wheel. Do you have your own experience (good or bad) you can share?

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.

Rofo moved to its 5th office space in our 2 year history last week. Those office spaces include a free conference room at a nearby university, an incubator space (kind of) that was occupied by about six other tech companies, a furnished rent by the cube month to month sublease space in San Francisco’s Soma neighborhood, a shared office space in the Bayview and now a direct lease in downtown San Francisco through Hines.

This latest move was significantly different than the previous moves on many levels. I’m certain that our experience is not unique but, nonetheless, worth describing in detail. Hopefully this can serve as a rough guide for other businesses on the move or considering a move.

Our lease situation prior to the move:

Up until the move we were occupying shared space (the other company was the actual tenant and was on the lease). We were well aware that our sublandlord was considering a future move and they had been in the market looking at office spaces for about 6 months with a tenant rep broker. They eventually settled on a space, made an offer, negotiated business terms and received a lease. The plan all along was to move to this new location in Soma and continue to reap the benefits of sharing someone’s space, furniture, services and equipment. However, at the time that the lease was being negotiated and the space layout and tenant improvements were being planned, we all came to the sudden realization that Rofo was not going to fit in the new space (based on some of our recent headcount). Our issue now was that we had already given notice to the landlord of our current space which meant we only had about 4 weeks to solve our own office space requirements.

Our search process:

Sometimes I think it was actually a blessing in disguise to only have 4 weeks to move. The commercial real estate market in the Bay Area (like every other market in the US) is soft. Meaning the available office space alternatives far exceed the demand. Because of this there are many spaces to consider. Fortunately for us, our entire staff was in agreement on location and amenity requirements. We wanted to be near public transit (buses and trains), parking was not important, and we wanted to be close to food and coffee shops (our prior space had none of that). Based on those criteria we knew, generally, where we wanted to be.

Landlords and commercial leasing agents typically want tenants to sign long-term leases. This type of lease, which may extend over many years, guarantees the landlord a reliable stream of rental income and allows them to avoid the hassle and expense of re-leasing the space. But if your business is growing, the last thing you want to do is lock into a five- or 10-year lease that limits your options.  A better alternative is a short-term lease with renewal options.

A renewal clause in a real estate lease allows a tenant to decide whether or not to extend the lease once the initial lease term expires.  For example, you could negotiate a two-year lease with four two-year renewal options, rather than a fixed 10-year lease.

Be aware that when you renew the lease after a lease term ends the landlord will try to raise the rent.  So make sure discuss this with the landlord and attempt to negotiate a series of predetermined rent increases for each renewal term. Renewal options that allow a landlord to raise rents based on fair-market rates can result in large rent increases — especially if your business operates in a booming area where commercial space is in demand.

Some landlords are reluctant to grant renewal options because it limits their flexibility to market the space to prospective tenants. Others, however, see renewal clauses as a good way to keep a tenant without having to re-negotiate their lease after the original term expires.