LoopNet Continues to Bolster Feature Set – Will It Continue?
July 22, 2011
LoopNet was well on its way to supplanting CoStar in relevancy before the offer to acquire LoopNet was made by CoStar. By becoming the “go to” place on the internet to post and sell/lease real estate, LoopNet had become too large to ignore and thus solved one of the largest hurdles for any company trying to compete in this space – getting brokers to consistently input their listings and data, and keep it updated.
In its march into CoStar’s territory, LoopNet has continued to add features, including a Polygon Search, as well as reporting templates which mirror many of those on CoStar. The Polygon search feature allows users to define their own search area, one of the tools that until recently set CoStar apart from LoopNet.
CoStar has always had extensive reporting templates, both for search as well as demographics and analytics, but LoopNet has quietly been adding to its reporting capabilities as well, including a fairly extensive amount of templates (screenshot below). One of the most useful features is the ability to create custom surveys, grab a custom link which you can then share with your clients streamlining the process of creating and sharing surveys.
Many customers are apprehensive about the result of the CoStar/LoopNet merger, but the hope here is that the team at LoopNet will continue to add useful features to its lineup.
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Hopefully it will help consolidate the commercial and land listings and become the standard to make it a bit easier to search for available properties.
I’m a little afraid of this merger. CoStar memberships are very expensive and out-of-budget for many smaller firms. LoopNet being merged into CoStar may end up costing the commercial real estate agents serious money.
I too, am very concerned about how much this merger is going to cost the commercial agent.
It is amazing that we the agents supply them with the majority of the data and then they sell it back to us at a high fee!
Why don’t they follow other great web sites and run ad’s to pay for their sites and keep our costs to a minimal, then purhaps their readship/memberships would increase greatly!
CoStar sells their data for a reason! It’s not perfect admittedly, however, if you looked at the program in depth to see what it could offer you for your niche in commercial real estate you would be suprised.
LoopNet Premier has gotten expensive, and I don’t see this changing with the CoStar buyout. That and more free sites keep popping up. If the free sites gain traction with SEO, LoopNET will have a problem. LoopNet does lead in SEO – no doubt.
I am finding the quality of qualified leads is dropping. They add “services”, which require us to input data, and then charge for it. Oh, and call us to remind us to input that data….
One other note, has anyone ever gotten a quality lead from the email lists? It seems to be a list of brokers who are keeping track of properties, not real buyers….
I have never received a quality lead or completed a deal with a tenant or buyer that found my property on Loopnet or CoStar. We have corporate memberships with both but most brokers that I work with rarely use either. CoStar comps are worthless in my opinion. Our internally managed database is all I rely on. The collective attitude towards CoStar amongst the major brokerage houses is “don’t share anything with CoStar.”. Why give our competitive advantage (our data) to our competitors and pay to do it?
I’ve recently used the new and improved Loop.net and it is getting much better. We’ll see how this all shakes out.
I think the merger may hurt the features and functions that were planned in the future. I think when companies merge with larger entities, at times, it complicates things.