Pushing Dirt

I’m going to dish out some geeky constructive criticism to costar.com right now, as a begrudging customer: consider engaging some SEO help! Under the search ‘commercial real estate’ costar barely breaks the top 10, beaten out by unknowns like commrex.com, cimls.com, and remax.com which is barely a commercial real estate company! Get out there and work on your back links, and consider making your site more Google friendly. I see what a tremendous amount of money you’re spending hammering away at loopnet (the number 1 ranker as far as google is concerned btw) by direct mail but some SEO juice would pay a much higher return as you try to promote the “property for sale” portion of your offerings. Push that pagerank: you’re a 5, and loopnet has you beat at a 6/10.

In these uncertain times, the church business is a growth industry.

For better or for worse, some of my largest transactions of late have been with churches.

To that end, I’ve begun a new site a to explore the ins and outs of church real estate: http://www.churchsale.net

It will address church site selection, the challenges of working with churches, adaptive re-use of other commercial property to church use, and the like.

It’s a little bar now but I hope you’ll keep an eye on the site as it grows.

Zillow claims it can value your house. Americans love this as we are obsessed with the value of everything. Thus the success of antique roadshow.

In washington dc they brag they have some of their best data, managing to come up within 20% of your ultimate price 84% of the time and within 10% about 65% of the time.

how good is that? In my neighborhood, a typical house sells for $800,000. They are talking about a swing of $320,000 and $160,000 in the two cases. I bet I could do that well just without any kind of fancy algorithm or magic eight ball.

Another example of a couple of tech guys with NO real estate experience pushing a tool of zero value on an unsophisticated public. Zillow’s a novelty site. If you need solid real estate information, look elzewhere.

I made a foray into trulia.com. can’t see using it to search for my next home.

maybe the same people who make their own beer will enjoy slogging through these incomplete listings of a handful of the properties that are on the market on their own, drifting through the wind without a sale (no pun intended).

Amazing that even in this day and age they have managed to raise $18 million that has clearly been squandered on worthless gimmicks like a “heat map.” Exactly what value does the $18 million heat map have to me as a home buyer? Zilch. Smoke and mirrors, ladies and gentlemen.

The realtor.com (found via Microsoft’s MSN real estate site) has 52 listings in my zip code. Trulia? 15.

The grand total of real estate experience on Trulia’s leadership team? Two years and 10 months.

The commercial world needs a free service like this because there’s no true multiple list in our world. Trulia defines superfluous.

Go ahead. Persuade me I’m wrong.