Yep, I found all that out in less than 10 minutes surfing the web. Okay, CoStar gave me access to Property Express for a day. Launched in November as a stripped-down version of CoStar's Property Professional, Property Express is available to anybody with a credit card -- $95 to the public, $49 to existing CoStar subscribers -- for use over a 24-hour period. You get full access to CoStar's for-lease and for-sale database, but you don't have Professional's full range of tools like market statistics, analytics and aerial photos.

According to Mark Klionsky, Property Express is aimed at both new CoStar users and existing subscribers working outside their own market area. So, for example, a tenant rep broker can begin to provide initial information about space availabilities and make local contacts. Or other real estate professionals, like appraisers and lenders, who don't currently subscribe to CoStar, can use it for due diligence work on a one-time basis.

The futurist Paul Saffo likes to say that we tend to overestimate change in the short run and underestimate change in the long run. Wow, how different access is to real estate information today. There's no way ten, twenty or thirty years ago that we could have imagined how easy it would be to acquire this kind of data. That's a seismic change. But are we smarter? I hope so!

--Peter Pike