How does the typical brokerage use the Costar Commercial Real Estate Service?
For my business, I need to know how brokerages use Costar. Do they use it for purely market data? Or do they use it to find contacts and find potential clients? How do you best leverage Costar in order to get the most out of it? Also are there any good alternatives to Costar out there?
[{"id": "i3ea4r4", "text": "Based on your post history it seems like you are looking to sell lead data to companies. Here's how I use it as a day-to-day broker associate:\n\nI use Costar for market information on comps, trends, and pricing. When meeting with clients we print off sales data and use this to plan listing prices and to negotiate deals for our clients.\n\nEvery morning I get market update emails for properties that have sold, been listed for sale, and been listed for lease in a region I target.\n\nWhen looking for leads, I use Costar to print out call lists and target buildings with certain characteristics (Industrial buildings between 5kSF-25kSF in a certain area, for example).\n\nThe best use for Costar is market data and lead generation (The information is at best 50% accurate, it is the starting off point for researching numbers and names in my opinion).\n\nI don't know of anything that comes close to Costar, Loopnet, or City Feet (All the same conglomerate). If you're trying to get data from CoStar, and sell it to someone else, best of luck varifying it.", "replies": [{"id": "i3edve2", "text": "I appreciate the insight. However for the record I am NOT trying to sell Costar's data as that is theft. I am purely selling my service and expertise working with them. Yes I can acquire data faster than what is normally possible, but only using legal methods that do not violate Costar's terms of service. I also do not have a Costar subscription and only utilize my client's existing Costar service to acquire data. I just want to make that clear.  \n\n\nSo brokerages do use it for lead generation. This is good to know. Since you already know about my service, do you think Commercial Brokerages would be interested in it?", "replies": [{"id": "i3errmy", "text": "To be clear I don\u2019t know what your service is. If you\u2019re selling leads, then I\u2019m sure brokerages will pay for it as long as they are quality leads that convert. \n\nCostar is used to find names to cold call, so they\u2019re used for lead generation, and not necessarily for leads.\n\nBest of luck!", "replies": [{"id": "i3f8qw5", "text": "Again, not selling leads, just the service that pulls them quickly. Thank you for your input, it helps!", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}]