|
The
Top 5 Commercial Brokerage Company Web
Sites
While
leading my "21st Century Power
Brokering in Commercial Real
Estate" presentation as part of the
Realcomm Commercial Real Estate
Technology Conference in June, I
announced the top 5 commercial brokerage
company Web sites within our industry.
The criteria for evaluating these Web
sites was the overall appearance of the
Web sites, their ease of navigation, the
ability for visitors to easily find
reports and information they'll want to
know about, and the ability to easily
locate individual agents on the Web
sites, and information about both these
agents and their available properties. With
these criteria in mind, here are the
five top commercial brokerage company
Web sites: CB
Richard Ellis (www.cbre.com) The
CB Richard Ellis Web site is simply the
best commercial real estate brokerage
Web site in the world. It has its own
internal search engine for finding both
people within the company and important
information, it constantly has recent
company news stories on its Home Page,
and it has a ticker tape showing vacancy
rates from cities around the world
constantly moving across its Home Page
also. In addition, visitors to the Web
site can easily find market reports,
individual agents, their available
properties, and detailed personal
information about the agents also. In
summary, just about everything about
this Web site tells the visitor,
"We're the major world-wide force
in the commercial real estate brokerage
industry." Grubb
& Ellis (www.grubbellis.com) Grubb
& Ellis has recently completed a
major renovation of its company's Web
site, and the results of this redesign
are outstanding. One of the great
features added to their Web site is the
search feature for their Quarterly
Trends Reports. Go to their Home Page,
then put your mouse over the
"Research" option near the top
of the page. From there click on the
"Quarterly Trends Reports"
option and watch the map of the United
States appear on your screen. Then move
your mouse over the different geographic
regions, watch each region get
highlighted as your mouse moves over it,
then click on one of the regions. Once
you've done this, then click on one of
the gold bullets corresponding to an
Office or Industrial report from one of
the cities in that region, and you'll be
taken to a PDF file with the most recent
Quarterly Trends Reports for that city. When
you combine this with the look and feel
of their overall Web site, the ability
to easily find additional information on
it, and the ability to both search for
properties and locate the company's
agents and their listings, you have all
the major components of a solid
commercial brokerage company Web site. JJ
Barnicke Limited (www.jjb.com) JJ
Barnicke is one of the top commercial
real estate brokerage companies in
Canada. Their Web site has a nice, clean
look to it, with easily visible links
for property searches, market reports,
information on the company, and a search
feature to find the agent or person
within the company that you're looking
for. All of these features combined with
the ease of navigation of this site make
it one of the premier commercial
brokerage company Web sites in the
business. Lee
& Associates (www.lee-associates.com) This
is a perfect example of how a simple Web
site can be a very good one. Links to
every single office in the company along
with these offices' phone numbers are
all easily visible on the Home Page. And
you can do property searches and find
agents directly through links on the
Home Page also. In addition, most but
not all of the Lee offices publish
market reports on their areas that you
can easily download, too. This
Web site does a great job of putting you
only one or two clicks away from most of
the information you'll want to know
about when you're a client or prospect
visiting the company's Web site. Sperry
Van Ness (www.svn.com) Sperry
Van Ness has seen tremendous positive
growth under the excellent guidance of
their President, David Frosh. When I
first heard David speak a number of
years ago he said, "At Sperry Van
Ness our brokers are our clients."
And right at that moment I thought to
myself, "What a revolutionary
perspective for any brokerage company to
have when looking at its brokers!" Sperry's
Web site makes it very easy to find
information on the company, conduct
property searches, find individual
brokers working for the company, view
their listings, and learn more personal
information about these brokers also. When
it comes to designing a Web site, one
would think that the major priorities
for a brokerage company would include
getting their Web visitors more
interested in doing business with the
company, and providing the company's
agents the opportunity to better market
themselves to their clients and
prospects. With this in mind, why is it
that so many brokerage companies provide
no information at all on the agents who
work for the companies on their Web
sites? Agents generate all of a
company's brokerage revenues, so I have
no idea what these companies are trying
to accomplish by keeping their agents
from marketing themselves through their
Web sites. With
this in mind, a year from now it will be
interesting to see if these same
brokerage companies retain their
positions as being one of the top five
Web sites in the commercial brokerage
industry, or whether one or more of
their competitors will rise up and claim
one of these positions for themselves!
Click
here for downloadable E-books and live audio interviews with
top-producing commercial real estate agents. These interviews
are with industry experts
who show you exactly what they do to
continually make $500,000.00 to more
than a million of dollars a year.
|
