1. NEW AND NOTABLE. For real estate professionals, Commonwealth Land Title Company provides free access to assessors' records, tax information, property profiles, comparable sales, plat maps, street maps and demographic information. Currently this service covers 17 counties, but soon all of California. If you are using Commonwealth as a title company and escrow agent, you can track the status of your sale electronically. This site is one of the very best sites for this type of governmental information, and I believe that over time Commonwealth could use it as a competitive advantage.

Cawley International, based in Dallas, specializes in tenant representation for clients with multiple national or international locations. San Diego-based Griswold Real Estate Management covers Southern California and Nevada. Big Brother's Data Warehouse (only accessible using Netscape's browser) contains Fulton County (Atlanta) records and is freely searchable, although in the future there will be a fee charged to access.

2. UPGRADES. The NAREIT web site, which was developed by RealPage in Dallas, is one of the very best association sites. In an attractive format, you'll find lots of information on the industry and links to related resources. NAREIT provides an excellent search engine to locate REITs that buy certain property types in specific geographical locations.

The New America Network continues to upgrade their site both for the public and as a private intranet which is actively used by hundreds of NAN brokers. Their intranet saves money previously spent sending 2-3 page faxes to each of their offices weekly. Their property listings database, which are available to the public, uses a new search engine.

3. FUTURE WEB. According to Brad Inman, "It is estimated that in California alone 90 percent of all resale home listings handled by an agent are now on the Web. Just one year ago, it was less than 1 percent." Source: San Francisco Examiner December 29, 1996. How soon will it be when the same can be said for commercial leases and sales? My guess is that 90 percent of all commercial listings will be on the Web by the end of 1998, if not sooner.

4. WEB SUCCESS. Bill Behr, a broker in CB Commercial's Dallas/Ft. Worth office, posted information on one of his listings, a medical office building, at his excellent web site. He then sent out e-mail to a local list of about a hundred commercial brokers with e-mail access. One of these brokers, John P. Brennan, of The Brennan Company, was interested and went to Behr's web site for full details. This led to negotiations with Brennan's client and a successful property sale on December 30, 1996, just three weeks later.

5. SITE OF THE WEEK. CarrAmerica, a REIT which owns 165 properties nationwide, acquires higher quality suburban office buildings. Brokers and users can search for space by geographic region, city and individual property. There is a picture of each building and information on square footage, rate and term.

6. PIKENET TIP. Once you generate a "Hit List" of sites at PikeNet you have the choice of ordering the list with the higher rated sites at the top. Just click the hyperlinked word "star" in the phrase "Order alphabetically (default) or by star" under the PikeNet logo.

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--Peter Pike