Real Property Alpha - Latest Comments in More on Social Media/Blogging

Re: More on Social Media/Blogging

Reeder — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:02:41 -0000

I think this is a valid comment. My point was more related to the traffic of the two sites. Loopnet is clearly killing Costar in traffic. But I would also admit that Costar has a higher quality product. To bring it back to social media, I think the point is that traffic is ultimately the goal and that cost of the service is going to be directly related to traffic.

Re: More on Social Media/Blogging

DJ — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:02:43 -0000

I can't believe you are putting CoStar in the same league as Loopnet. CoStar is used by institutional investors. Loopnet??? I don’t know what it is like now, because I haven’t checked the site out for over 10 years. But I remember it to be gabage back then.

Re: More on Social Media/Blogging

Reeder — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:16:45 -0000

Joshua - Thanks for commenting. I can say that this time I agree with you 100%. Costar data is good but expensive.

Re: More on Social Media/Blogging

joshua — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:54:11 -0000

Sorry Chris, I have to slightly disagree with you. Yes, costar does just aggregate public info. but they also research the info and actively try to verify the data. i have my issues with costar. but the info that is there is either good or not and you can tell very easily. on a national scale (since we do national deals) i will never waste the time/energy/money to create or maintain sale and lease comp info for markets where we do deals or may analyze a deal. so cal deals is one thing. you can do a lot of that in house with a college intern or company staff. but thats only a portion of the business.

loopnet is garbage. its a necessary evil. the info is crap. anyone can list any info regardless of exclusivity or correctness. of curse we advertise on it cause it gets the most views. and it pisses me off when i see some guy listng our property under there name. and rarely does it facilitate a deal closing or get us good info. it gets us an idea of info that we can then research and verify. the closed info is supplied by the broker - so you know its overstated 99% of the time.

that being said, correct info will always garner people willing to pay for it and institutions will never rely on unverified info. if they do, you can expect to plenty of lawsuits make headlines over their lack of due diligence.

Re: More on Social Media/Blogging

Chris Rodriguez — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:24:17 -0000

Good post John. A couple of quick comments:

1) CoStar is going to die soon. For the most part, they charge for information that is publicly available - they just do a very good job aggregating it. Other than that, they do not add much value.

2) 800,000 uniques! I question that number. Sounds like the work of an SEO ninja. If it is real, there is something to think about here.

3) The "freemium" model is a solid one for niche based websites. Most of the content should be free and add a ton of value to attract a high volume of visitors. Once value is added, you can then charge for premium services. Twitter will be doing this soon. The examples of this are widespread. Scribd and SlideShare are some recent examples.