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October 2006
Oct. 13, 2006 - If we could just erase everything... |
Our association had an interesting presentation this week by the CEO of the Commercial Board of Michigan (CBOR). Frankly a commercial specialist association is a great thing for the association for which I work: we are a smallish group of real estate practitioners, located in a resort community which is pretty well out of the mainstream of travel destinations (and, I hasten to add, we LIKE it that way!). But as far as our market goes, we have many people wanting to move here, and many looking for businesses and properties to support their lifestyle.
So, many of our association members sell some commercial real estate. But our area is not big enough to support many single focused specialists, so we have a lot of 'crossover' selling, or 'resi-mercial' members, as our speaker called them.
And our association can't support much in the way of offerings for these members-- we direct our limited resources to the majority of our members who mostly sell houses and land, not bars and barbershops and bait stores.
So along comes the Commercial Board--hooray!! Our members can join CBOR as secondary members, and have access to specialist support services and statewide marketing. Most investors don't care WHERE a property is located, as far as the MLS territory is concerned (for that matter, neither do a lot of second home buyers...but that's another story). It's great then that there's a group for the commercial Realtor--one that can offer risk management programs, forms, education--a whole range of specialized services. And even better, offer a listing database that is truly of use. That database is called CPIX, the Commercial Property Information Exchange.
Now here's where I started thinking about the value of just plain starting over with a property listing program, because here's the way the commercial listing database works:
1. Anybody can enter a property. If the goal is to accumulate a comprehensive aggregation of saleable commercial properties, why not? That means that the who person owns a shopping mall with space to lease or purchase could enter it in the listing database, whether or not the owner had a real estate license, or was a member of the Commercial Board.
Result: a diverse aggregation of property, efficiently accessible in one place.
2. Entering a listing is free. Result: Contributing to the database is encouraged, even incentivised. Funding can come from other sources.
3. There's an absence of rules and requirements for members and guests who enter listings. The operating theory is that folks are adults, and a successful representation of a property is to the owner or listing broker's best interest.
4. Membership does have its privileges, like being able to search all listings (which guests can't do), and having the listings available on the public website while guest or non-member properties are available only on the Members-Only website. Again, this program isn't meant to be a free advertising service: it's a collection of properties available for sale for use by the CBOR and commercial property exchange members--not the general public.
5. There is no guarantee of compensation amounts. This is a property information exchange, not an offer of compensation and or cooperation: if a member sees something she wants to explore further as a potential transaction property, she calls the contact person for the subject property.
Of course there are a whole lot of other subtleties, but it seems to me that somebody real smart sat down and said, "What do we need here? a comprehensive collection of properties to sell? OK, what's the best way to do that?" And then that Smart Person (or committee, or whomever) hired a real good program design person, and put this tool together. Not rocket science, but there's something to be said for starting with a clean blackboard and keeping the development true to the purpose.
It occurs to me that residential MLSs have some lessons they could learn from here.. |
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A behind the scenes look at organized real estate--what works in an association, what doesn't, and what a long time AE sees as challenges facing the industry from the viewpoint of its professional organization.
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