Added 3/13/14 by Ken Silberling

On Monday March 8, in lieu of our regular sales meeting, we got a visit and training session from our local CoStar representative Tom Russell. Costar is a comprehensive database of all commercial properties in major markets across the U.S.  Costar surveys all office, industrial, retail and multifamily properties plus raw land to provide current and historical sale and leasing data to its subscribers. In 2012, Costar acquired its primary competitor, Loopnet for $860 million and earlier this month, they acquired Apartments.com for $565 million. The result is that CoStar is now a $6 billion company.

Brenner Real Estate Group is a CoStar subscriber as are our major local and national competitors in the commercial real estate market. Those firms that subscribe to CoStar have a major advantage over those that don’t. We and our competitors use the same tool and have terabytes of data at our fingertips.

Those firms that can best learn to use this tool can set themselves apart from the competition. That was our objective on Monday.  Tom was able to answer our questions on how to extract information from Costar to help us do more deals and provide the best service for our clients.

We use CoStar to gather sales comp data to help us attain court appointed receiverships. We use their occupancy and rental rate data to help us make decisions for our commercial property management clients.  CoStar also allows us to rapidly develop lists of tenants and property owners to aid in marketing our property listings.

Tom Russell our account representative fielded questions from Brenner’s brokerage and management professionals to help us to get the most out of our CoStar subscription. Some of the items we discussed were:

1. How to generate a list of owners and tenants within a radius of any of our listings;
2. How to use “peering” to compare the performance of our listings to the market;
3. How to use CoStar’s new lease analysis module to compare proposals for tenant representation assignments.

• “Costar keeps getting better and better and helps me to be more efficient and look good in front of my clients” said Brenner Senior Vice President  and CoStar Power Broker Kathy Alberts, CCIM.
  
  
• For Brenner’s Helen Weissman, CCIM “The training inspired me to create a new prospect list for industrial prospects.”
  
  
• Associate Hillary Garbarino Adds "Costar is constantly evolving and their purhcase of apartments.com should be a valuable addition to the brokers searching the mult-family market."
  
  
• And our Senior Statesman Bert Freehof adds “The noted search tools that are available to us don’t do anyone any good, unless they are applied right and for the right reasons.  At Brenner Real Estate Group, we have learned the techniques of when and how to apply these tools.”

By continuing to develop our knowledge of CoStar, Brenner’s professionals continue to set ourselves apart from the competition.  CoStar’s whopping $6 billion valuation is a clear indication of the value of commercial real estate information.  It is that value that Brenner Real Estate professionals bring to our clients every day.

Brenner Real Estate Group is a full-service commercial real estate firm providing asset solutions, brokerage, investment sales, property management, asset management, and receivership services for office,
industrial/commercial, retail and multi-family properties. The firm has been serving Florida since 1987.
For more information, visit Brenner Real Estate Group on the web at www.breg.net, on Facebook at “Brenner Real Estate Group” or on Twitter at “BrennerREgroup”.  Contact the firm at 1500 West Cypress Creek Road, Suite 409, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309, 954.596.5555 or toll free at 1-888-333-2734 (BREG).