While leading my "21st Century Power Brokering in Commercial Real Estate" presentation as part of the Realcomm Commercial Real Estate Technology Conference in June, I announced the top 5 commercial brokerage company websites within our industry. The criteria for evaluating these websites was the overall appearance of the websites, their ease of navigation, the ability for visitors to easily find reports and information they'll want to know about, and the ability to easily locate individual agents on the websites, and information about both these agents and their available properties.

With these criteria in mind, here are the five top commercial brokerage company websites:

CB Richard Ellis (cbre.com)

The CB Richard Ellis website is simply the best commercial real estate brokerage website in the world. It has its own internal search engine for finding both people within the company and important information, it constantly has recent company news stories on its Home Page, and it has a ticker tape showing vacancy rates from cities around the world constantly moving across its Home Page. In addition, visitors to the website can easily find market reports, individual agents, their available properties, and detailed personal information about the agents.

In summary, just about everything about this website tells the visitor, "We're the major world-wide force in the commercial real estate brokerage industry."

Grubb & Ellis (grubbellis.com)

Grubb & Ellis has recently completed a major renovation of its company's website, and the results of this redesign are outstanding. One of the great features added to their website is the search feature for their Quarterly Trends Reports. Go to their Home Page, then put your mouse over the "Research" option near the top of the page. From there click on the "Quarterly Trends Reports" option and watch the map of the United States appear on your screen. Then move your mouse over the different geographic regions. Watch each region get highlighted as your mouse moves over it, then click on one of the regions. Once you've done this, then click on one of the gold bullets corresponding to an Office or Industrial report from one of the cities in that region, and you'll be taken to a PDF file with the most recent Quarterly Trends Reports for that city.

When you combine this with the look and feel of their overall website, the ability to easily find additional information on it, and the ability to both search for properties and locate the company's agents and their listings, you have all the major components of a solid commercial brokerage company website.

JJ Barnicke Limited (jjb.com)

JJ Barnicke is one of the top commercial real estate brokerage companies in Canada. Their website has a nice, clean look to it, with easily visible links for property searches, market reports, information on the company, and a search feature to find the agent or person within the company that you're looking for. All of these features combined with the ease of navigation of this site make it one of the premier commercial brokerage company websites in the business.

Lee & Associates (lee-associates.com)

This is a perfect example of how a simple website can be a very good one. Links to every single office in the company along with these offices' phone numbers are all easily visible on the Home Page. And you can do property searches and find agents directly through links on the Home Page also. In addition, most but not all of the Lee offices publish market reports on their areas that you can easily download, too.

This website does a great job of putting you only one or two clicks away from most of the information you'll want to know about when you're a client or prospect visiting the company's website.

Sperry Van Ness (svn.com)

Sperry Van Ness has seen tremendous positive growth under the excellent guidance of their President, David Frosh. When I first heard David speak a number of years ago he said, "At Sperry Van Ness our brokers are our clients." And right at that moment I thought to myself, "What a revolutionary perspective for any brokerage company to have when looking at its brokers!"

Sperry's website makes it very easy to find information on the company, conduct property searches, find individual brokers working for the company, view their listings, and learn more personal information about these brokers.

When it comes to designing a website, one would think that the major priorities for a brokerage company would include getting their Web visitors more interested in doing business with the company, and providing the company's agents the opportunity to better market themselves to their clients and prospects. With this in mind, why is it that so many brokerage companies provide no information at all on the agents who work for the companies on their websites? Agents generate all of a company's brokerage revenues, so I have no idea what these companies are trying to accomplish by keeping their agents from marketing themselves through their websites.

With this in mind, a year from now it will be interesting to see if these same brokerage companies retain their positions as being one of the top five websites in the commercial brokerage industry, or whether one or more of their competitors will rise up and claim one of these positions for themselves!

Published: October 3, 2006

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