In most ways, the commercial real estate industry has been slower than its residential counterpart at developing its own technology. Loopnet is a glaring exception.
Founded in 1995, a full decade before Zillow, Loopnet’s commercial real estate marketplace was on the bleeding edge of CRE ProptTech. They leveraged their first-mover advantage well, growing into a huge, publicly-traded company while maintaining the largest CRE listing platform by any meaningful measure.
For decades, Loopnet was the only real game in town. Investors used it to source deals, find comps, and help with due diligence. But as the buy-side of CRE became more competitive, investors came to prize speed, nimbleness, and responsiveness over a sheer number of listings. Some buyers found Loopnet’s size and shifting policies to be difficult to navigate and cumbersome.
In response, a whole slew of smart marketplaces and data intelligence solutions have emerged.
These five PropTech tools offer clean listings, user-friendly interfaces, and creative tools to help investors find and evaluate deals quickly.
Each tool has its own advantages, and picking which to use depends on the job you want to accomplish. For most investors, it’ll pay to combine more than one to get the clearest market view and accelerate your deal flow.
Obviously, we’re going to list our own product first. But it’s not just self-promotion; closing your next investment starts with finding the perfect listing.
Loopnet has a deep pool of 1.1 million potential investment properties in its marketplace. But some investors complain that listings are visible months after the property is sold—so you waste time sifting through out-of-date data.
Biproxi’s marketplace trades overwhelming volume for a curated library of vetted and updated listings. Brokers that place listings on biproxi are provided coaching to make sure the data they share is complete and accurate. And the listing upload process requests as much information as possible so you can make a more credible offer faster.
For each Biproxi listing, you’ll find:
You’ll also find a host of investor tools designed to make CRE transactions more straightforward. With Biproxi you can curate a list of favorite listings, track offers you’ve sent, and communicate directly with the selling broker—all from your dashboard.
Biproxi matches your listings with real, qualified investors whose individual criteria match your property, Create your free Biproxi account today and see how investor matching generates better leads, and helps you close more deals, faster.
Loopnet is designed to market for-sale properties. So while you can cobble together some comparables there, that’s not its primary function.
Compstak’s CRE comp data is purpose-built to help you assess property value with confidence. They crowdsource their data from 30K+ brokerages, then their team of data scientists continually reviews it for accuracy. That means the information you find on Compstak is both reliable and not available elsewhere.
When you search Compstak, you’ll find:
Compstak also offers reporting tools, so it’s easy to help your partners visualize the data you’ve uncovered there.
Off-market properties are attractive investments because you can buy them before they’ve hit the competitive public market. To find them, you need data about each property and some detective work. But Loopnet’s marketplace holds only properties publicly listed for sale.
Reonomy, on the other hand, shows data on over 50 million off-market CRE assets. Using their custom filters, you can sort through it quickly to find owners who might be in a position to sell before they publicly list their property.
On Reonomy, you can search by:
Then you can combine those filters for an even more powerful off-market search. For example, you could search for recently sold properties, then look at the previous owner’s portfolios to see if there are other assets they’re ready to shed.
Loopnet’s listings and tools are geared for mid-market, North American CRE buyers—you won’t find listings in other countries.
Brevitas, on the other hand, has a sizable marketplace of listings from around the world. They also specialize in enterprise-class investments, so institutional investors will find plenty of $50 million+ properties for sale there.
Brevitas also helps investors manage deals in progress. Their deal room allows you to:
Brevitas’ dashboard helps investors keep track of all their activity. Requests, favorites, and even listings that match your criteria but may have missed are all easily visible there.
Crexi’s marketplace is similar to that of Loopnet: a large number of listings that are free to search with some information behind a paywall and reports of out-of-date listings.
Crexi differentiates itself with its research tools that go way beyond what’s offered on Loopnet. On Crexi, you’ll find:
You’ll need a paid subscription to access most of Crexi’s research data, but the cost is pretty reasonable.
Another nice feature of Crexi is its map overlay tool. With an overlay, you can visualize things like median incomes, traffic counts, and points of interest, making due diligence and research easier to comprehend.
It used to be that if you wanted to find CRE, you went to Loopnet, end of story. But now, listings and data are housed in several marketplaces and data centers—much of it unique to those platforms. Until there’s a unified listing service for CRE (like residential’s MLS), it pays to regularly search multiple marketplaces.
