PikeNet Dispatch, June 26, 2003
Vol 8 No. 50 (679), "More than 9,000 subscribers"

Reducing Your "Cycle Time." ... Imagine this scenario. On Thursday, you e-mail a sale "teaser" to 1,500 principals. On Monday, you receive 40 signed confidentiality agreements from interested buyers. On Tuesday, you send out 40 passwords providing access to due diligence materials online. On Wednesday, you send the owner a detailed report showing which prospects have accessed which documents. Your client is dazzled.

Is this a fantasy? Not according to Matt Schnurr with Grubb & Ellis' Institutional Services Group in Fairfield, NJ, who uses Real Capital Markets to market his listings faster. He even closed a $20 million shopping center at a 7% cap rate just eight days after his principal buyer showed up. Of course, that was unusually fast. But Schnurr believes that RCM typically cuts weeks out of the sales cycle.

So why don't more brokers outsource the delivery of marketing information? One reason I've heard is that brokers don't want sellers to know that they are using a third party's database of buyers. After all, isn't that why brokers are hired in the first place -- to source buyers? According to Schnurr, that's a bogus objection. While Schnurr's three-person team can track hundreds of buyers, they can't possibly track the ten thousand plus principal buyers in the RCM database. Schnurr's sellers actually like the fact that his team adds outside contacts to his own internal database.

"I can't imagine going back to the Old World of real estate marketing." That's the world of personal databases like ACT, FedExed diskettes of ARGUS runs, and glossy due diligence tomes. From Schnurr's perspective it makes much more sense to spread the cost of data acquisition and technology infrastructure beyond his own team and his firm. What do you think?

--Peter Pike