Zoliath.com is set to allow visitors to search for service providers
at a city or regional level, and to filter these searches according to
exact specifications. The core categories for companies include
aerial photography, appraisal, architecture, banks, building inspection, commercial real estate brokerage and property management,
general contractors, insurance, law, finance and signage.
A broker for the past 22 years, Thornton says he launched
Zoliath with a team of IT professionals because “besides the phone
book, there was really no centralized place that housed all this
information and one that was high-level enough that pre-screened
all the non-specialists, which the phone books really don’t do.” He
does stress, however, that Zoliath does not recommend the specialists it features; it’s up to the user to find out whether a particular
firm suits its needs.
Certain software applications have helped property owners and
managers save money and reduce costs, says Michael Mullin, gen-
eral manager at Integrated Business Systems, a Totowa, NJ-based
provider of integrated property management, accounting and con-
struction management systems for commercial real estate owners,
developers and property managers. He cites the efficiencies that
In September, Actovia Commercial Mortgage Intelligence,
which is based in New York City, officially launched Actovia
Explorer. Touted as a “next generation cloud-based commercial
real estate search and delivery system,” it’s geared to commercial
mortgage finance professionals seeking to research and generate
leads for refinancing properties in the New York City area.
No longer notorious for its aversion to technology,
the commercial real estate industry is taking a
giant leap forward—with the help of a few innovations
exist in dealing with vendor invoices as an example; rather than
dealing with paper invoices and overnight mailing costs, many
companies now scan invoices, store them through e-mail and have
the firm’s application manager approve the invoices.
“They are automatically entered into the system and you’ve
eliminated, if nothing else, the FedEx cost of a couple of packages
a week,” he says, not to mention the effort behind the keystrokes
since “a lot of the data is picked up off the scanning systems. With
those kinds of pointed solutions, there have certainly been a lot of
improvements and efficiencies.”
In terms of new technology’s impact on the industry, Mullin
relates: “We have many applications that distribute data to iPads
and mobile devices, which allows people to have real-time infor-
mation. You have real-time availability and real-time pricing,
which makes it substantially easier to discuss leasing and those
kinds of things. Many of the applications change the way people
lease space.”
The IT department’s role is no longer just about fixing broken
computers or troubleshooting software apps. “The IT group has
become more strategic as they find and implement the tools that
make the company more effective,” Mullin says. “Certainly being
able to understand what the company need is and turn that into
solutions that help them is becoming more the purpose of the IT
group versus ‘my Internet connection is down or e-mail is down.’
So much of that is going into cloud applications that don’t require
that deep technological expertise, but much more business-ori-
ented analyst kind of work.”
Despite the technology revolution taking place, the commercial
finance sector has been slow in providing key property and financial data online, says Ingber. Actovia Explorer’s system data is targeted to commercial real estate mortgage brokers, appraisers and
lenders. Ingber added that the company is also looking to segment
the data for commercial real estate service providers.
The software provides not only basic information on a particular
property, such as location and square footage, but it also includes
loan information, including term expiration and rates, and contact
information on the ownership. The company is looking to roll out
information on securitized loans in the Manhattan area in the near
future, Ingber adds.
He says Actovia Explorer users can also conduct searches of the
data, for example, to secure a list of multifamily properties and
their ownership in a particular zip code of Manhattan whose loans
are coming due in the next 18 months. A practical analysis system
allows users to further break down searches by area, lender, property type, address and owner.
Ingber shares that after a recent database search, a user “was
able to take the deal that was done in the last two months at a simi-
lar type of property and go back to the bank and say: ‘I know you
did this deal for this rate, why can’t you do it for me?’ ”
If achievements and uses like that are any indication, it won’t be
long before technological innovations completely change the way
the commercial real estate business operates. ◆
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