Contents
CityFeet's Direct Connections

CityFeet's Direct Connections... Will a real estate Internet site connect buyer and sellers directly? Landlords and tenants? ... Most current real estate Internet sites, like listing services and buyer matching services, primarily aim to make the real estate transaction process more efficient for brokers -- not to restructure it. Now along comes CityFeet, a new space listing service, aimed at fundamentally changing the way that small spaces (2-10,000 square feet) are transacted. CityFeet is the brainchild of Guy Shanon, who believes that the traditional way of marketing smaller spaces (e.g., newspaper listings and broker fliers) is better suited to an Internet platform.

So he's created CityFeet, which is focused on Manhattan commercial space. The financial model is that the owner or owner's agent pays a fee to enter the space in the CityFeet database. Shanon says that the fee will eventually be between $50 and $100 per month (much less than a newspaper ad), but is currently being waived to seed the database. Prospective tenants or tenant brokers can search the database on the net for free. If a prospective tenant doesn't find what he's looking for, he can create a CityFeet Agent, which will send e-mail when a new space is entered in the database.

Most brokers (particularly in Manhattan!) don't want to work on small transactions. So a service like CityFeet, which plans to provide extensive local market information, offers interesting possibilities for making direct (read non-broker facilitated) connections. Quoting CityFeet: "Give Manhattan business people the information they need to make economic decisions, and they have the initiative and smarts to take care of the rest." ... What do you think? Are there certain types of transactions (e.g., small spaces, triple net leases, loans) where an information service can produce real estate transactions? What will the impact of ubiquitous real estate information be? ... Send e-mail to me .

.--Peter