Peracon: "The Book" is History

Prepare Your Own Marketing Center ... The sale of institutional grade property has traditionally required the preparation of "The Book," complete with beautiful binding, gorgeous photography, customized maps and table after table of financial analyses. The cost? Maybe $15,000 to $30,000 or more for just a few hundred copies. The broker then rushes this by FedEx to clients before the numbers get too far out of date. Sounds primitive, right?

Well, Peracon wants to change that paradigm, and last week COO Johan Fatemi toured me (virtually) around his online marketing and due diligence service. The process begins with a broker sending a teaser with basic property information. (For an example, go to Tishman International and click Corporate Square at the bottom of the page.) As a prospective buyer, the first step is to download and return the Confidentiality Agreement. The broker then assigns you a login name and password.

Once you're so authorized, you can download all of the documents posted by the broker. Fatemi showed me dozens of documents associated with the recent sale of a single-tenant office building in Portland, OR, including the Sale Agreement, Demographic Analysis, Structural Engineering Report, Lease Abstract, etc. As the buyer pokes around, his "footprints" are tracked with administrative tools. So a broker knows exactly which documents have been accessed and when they were downloaded. Cool.

The cost to use Peracon's "self-service" system is $3,500. Self-service, of course, means that you do all of the work uploading your own documents, including the contacts and e-mail addresses of your prospective buyers. Fatemi claims that brokers at CB Richard Ellis, Eastdil and Insignia/ESG have learned the system easily.

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--Peter Pike