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Online listing sites such as LoopNet helped revolutionize the way commercial properties were marketed. But a 3 1/2-year-old Web-based service owned and operated by the Indiana Board of Commercial Realtors is eating away at LoopNet’s dominance and could one day replace it for most intents and purposes.
ICREX, or the Indiana Commercial Real Estate Exchange, was created in response to brokers’ concerns about the costs, structure and data ownership policies of LoopNet and similar privately owned, for-profit Web listing services.
“The systems we’ve used…each one had its issues,” said David Nugent, a partner in BND commercial and the IBCR’s northeast regional director. “On LoopNet, for example, sales and leasing are two separate databases and can’t be merged. You actually have to enter it two separate times. And once you put that info in LoopNet, they own it.”
With ICREX, listings need only be entered once, and can be adjusted and expanded if needed. But the most important aspect is that the commercial Realtor members retain ownership of the information and the system, and so they also control the costs, Nugent said.
Each commercial broker member in the state automatically has a basic membership. An upgraded, premium membership costs about $1 a day, said Jill Curtis, the IBCR’s director of marketing.
“LoopNet is three times the cost of ICREX for a premium membership,” Nugent said.
Fort Wayne-area commercial real-estate brokers got together and agreed as a group to put their listings on ICREX first, said John Caffray, of NAI Harding Dahm, who represents northeast Indiana on the ICREX commitee. Other parts of the state have not adopted it as quickly.
“Right now, the community of local brokers…has made ICREX the site we will always use,” Nugent said. Local commercial Realtors may still also use LoopNet, but each firm has decided how many and what memberships to maintain. Many have cut back on LoopNet use, but will probably maintain some sort of dual listing at least for the time being,” Nugent said.
“I guess the long-term goal is for LoopNet to realize they have to sit down with commercial Realtors and negotiate and LoopNet becomes one of the sites we automatically upload to,” Nugent said.
Indiana’s board of commercial Realtors is not the only one to embrace a member-owned alternative to LoopNet and other for-profit services, Curtis noted. Thirty-five other groups across the United States have similar programs.
The ICREX and other broker groups’ listings also are fed into a number of other Web sites, including CommercialSource.com, CommercialIQ.com, Lycos and Google, to get national exposure. In Marion County, ICREX listings are fed to economic-development agencies, which can refer to them when courting prospects or helping businesses relocate.
Nugent and Caffray would like to see economic-development organizations in northeast Indiana do the same, although the details still have to be worked out. Brokers and representatives of some of the groups have discussed the possibilities, and the reaction of many has been, “When can you start?” Nugent said.
It’s hard to measure how successful ICREX has been in its short history in generating deals, Curtis acknowledged.
“We do have completed transactions. We encourage people to put those in so they are part of the system. But I think brokers kind of hold their cards close to the chest. They want to know what others are doing, but they don’t always want to provide the same information. There’s an ongoing challenge in getting that kind of feedback. We know people are having success. We just don’t have numbers,” she said.
Because it was designed by and for brokers, ICREX has several features that LoopNet does not, Caffray said. It’s more user-friendly, has better information and it allows a broker to create a custom report for a client or prospect, for example.
Listings have to be updated every 30 days to make sure the information stays current, Curtis added.
“Once the word gets out and people know about ICREX and get used to it, it will be our primary database,” Caffray predicted. “What we need is full participation in the rest of the state. I think we’ve got a good start on it, but it’s not 100 percent yet.
“I think we’re going to give LoopNet a run for its money.”
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