We’ve been busy introducing a lot of new features for commercial brokers, property owners, and tenants to connect. With the launch of our new commercial building pages and real estate profiles there are now more ways to make our platform work for you no matter your role in commercial real estate.

We’re thrilled with the amount of listings and profiles being added everyday. For those of you outside of the US, we’re listening. I can’t give a firm estimate on our international expansion but know that it is coming soon.

Lastly we’re excited to be working with 2 new local landlords who have a combined portfolio of 8 million square feet: Wareham Development and Dollinger Properties. Both companies have a diverse portfolio of office space, lab space, r & d, and retail.



A real estate Update on Rofo is any real estate activity related to a space or property outside of marketing a listing. Samples of Updates include a property tour, a sale, a completed lease, or any project related to a space or property. Just like property listings on Rofo, an Update gets attached to the property/building page on Rofo as well as your profile. And with our real estate app for Linkedin, updates will also appear on your Linkedin profile.

Post an Update

Updates appear on your profile page

Updates also appear on building pages

Here’s how it works:
1) sign in to Rofo and click ‘post a new update’
2) select the type of update and some basic info about the property
3) add a description to the update
4) post

Your activity now gets mapped on your profile. And it also gets added to our searchable building pages.
Building pages on Rofo are searched by tenants, buyers, brokers, property owners, and service providers. And its great way to make very targeted real estate connections related to a specific property or neighborhood.

We surpassed 265,000 listings added to Rofo over the weekend. Thanks to our most recent members for joining Rofo and adding the following listings:

Industrial space in Escondido

Investment property in Glen Park San Francisco

Corner retail space in Chicago

furnished office space in Fremont

Owner user office building in McLean, VA

Retail building in Mount Pleasant, SC

Furnished office suites in El Dorado Hills

Office space for lease in Gainesville, Fl



Since our initial site launch (more than 3 years ago – wow) our goal has been to simplify the search for real estate/office space/a new location. Our approach has been listings focused – make them easier to find, easier to search, and surround them with helpful info like maps, similar listings, and local amenities. And we’ve partnered with some great companies to make it even easier to discover available properties.

Introducing profiles

We’ve been quietly introducing real estate profiles on Rofo over the last few months. They’re now jam packed with functionality and supporting the idea of building more and better real estate connections.

Rofo real estate profile

Since launching our real estate app for Linkedin about 18 months ago we’ve spoken with many thousands of people in real estate (tenants, brokers, landlords, buyers, investors) about profiles geared for real estate. One of the key features was designing a profile that demonstrates where they are experts – everyone wants to know they’re working with the right person. Listings come and go but being able to show the buildings you tour, the leases you’ve signed, the sales you’ve made, the active requirements you have, and the projects you’ve completed provides for a lasting (hate to say it) timeline.

Building pages

Which leads us to building pages. Over the last few years Rofo has been building a very very large database of searchable properties in the US. With your Rofo real estate profile you can literally ‘tag’ all of the properties you have toured, leased, sold, etc.

We think this has so much benefit for all stakeholders in the real estate transaction. Its sharing just enough information to generate more connections (and hopefully successful transactions) without compromising any proprietary info you want to keep for your inner circle.

And it all integrates with Linkedin (through our app) so you can keep your Linkedin professional connections in the loop know.

We welcome you to start building your real estate profile on Rofo, build more connections, and tagging the properties and markets that you know.

We have a long list of features we’ll be adding over the coming weeks. And, as always, welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Rofo, like many other companies, will fall into the trap of pitching new features and functions as the reason to join, subscribe, pay, register, etc.

We’ll promote things like:

>>seamless and exclusive listings integration with Linkedin

>>widgets that allow you to insert your listings on your website or blog

>>compete control and ownership of your data (you can even export it into excel with images, lat/long, etc, etc.

>>the most active marketplace of tenants

>>page views, impressions, unique visitors

>>augmented reality

>>really cool profiles that capture your knowledge and expertise like no other

And then you’ll get a call or email from a customer (in this case a commercial real estate broker) telling you about the quality connections they have made, the business they have closed, and the positive impact you’ve had on their business.

And you’re once again reminded of the number one reason.

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

Exterior shot of our new location on Maiden Lane in San Francisco. You can see Union Square in the background.

Rofo is currently searching for a new office space. It’s a time consuming and thankless task. There’s a lot of choice, too many spaces to tour, and not enough information online to weed out the bad matches.

It’s ironic. Rofo is in the business of simplifying the search for commercial real estate. We spend each and every day thinking about ways to make the discovery process easier. How do you gather and assemble all of the listings? How do you capture really good descriptive content that allows you to make an apples to apples comparison? How do you avoid touring the bad spaces?

There are some ways to solve this using technology. But ultimately it comes down to social interaction and getting recommendations from knowledgeable people who have already been there. But how do you find those people?

Rofo’s answer to this: create a leasing profile and post it to Rofo.

Every month thousands of businesses post their requirements on Rofo. And every month thousands of proposals/recommendations are sent and connections are made.

The reason it works is that no two space requirements are the same. The space size, the budget, the timing, the amenities, the important deal terms – they are all different. And when you search office space listings online it is not clear which space will meet the majority of your needs and which landlords actually have a reputation for performing on their obligations.

It all starts with you – the searcher. Take the time to be as descriptive as you can about your requirements. Do you have a budget? Do you know your projected headcount? Do you know generally where you want to commute to? Put as much of this down and the quality of your connections will only improve.

Rofo will be rolling out even more functionality in the coming weeks to help with making the right connections. Stay tuned…

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.

T3 Advisors out of Boston (and now Silicon Valley) is a firm that specializes in representing the real estate requirements of technology companies. They’re also a really innovative crew when it comes to the use of technology, social media and the internet to grow and support their business.

As a ‘tenant rep’ or ‘buy-side’ brokerage firm without real estate listings, there’s an inherent challenge in promoting your real estate expertise and brand. One of the many things T3 is doing is using the Real Estate Pro app for Linkedin to promote their real estate updates and past successes. Its a great use of the app on one of the most important and measurable professional networking environments.

We welcome T3 as a new customer and partner and we’re very excited that our technology is playing a part in their overall marketing efforts.