Rofo sits down with Colliers Walnut Creek office & industrial broker Eric Erickson. He explains why he enjoys using Rofo and how it helped his brokerage business.

Eric does a good job tracking where his leads come from and is observing a decline in sign calls while leads coming from online sources like Rofo and craigslist continue to increase. He’s also seen newspaper advertising decline in importance as online listings services continue to proliferate. Obviously, a fundamental shift is occurring in how people search for commercial space. More and more people are using an online resource to find their space and even in a down market leads from the internet are increasing while sign calls are decreasing.

Eric thinks Rofo is a great commercial space listing service and highly recommends it to other brokers with small listings. “Rofo’s been worth the money, and I think if a broker is not using it they’re losing money, and they’re losing leads.”, explains Eric.

Interview
My Name is Eric Erickson. I’m and office industrial broker out of Walnut Creek Colliers.

How long have you used Rofo?
I’ve Been using Rofo about a year and a half, two years now and I market a lot of small spaces for my clients and it’s been a good vehicle to market small spaces.

Has Rofo generated tenant leads?

Yes, Rofo has provided us a way to expose our properties like we haven’t before. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking sign calls and the different ways that the tenant leads come in. Rofo has been on the growth, sign calls are down, but Rofo’s up.

Is Rofo’s craigslist posting feature useful?

Absolutely, before we used to, obviously, advertise in the newspaper, but as craigslist became the classified ads online, newspapers became less important. But craigslist, ads fall off craigslist, and Rofo has an excellent feature to keep your ads on craigslist until you change it. So its an excellent listing service to use if you want to attract tenants through craigslist.

Is the Rofo site easy to use?

Yeah the site’s pretty easy to navigate and load up your information. It works really well going the other way from the tenants perspective, they go through and they either can find us through craigslist or the Rofo site.

Would you recommend Rofo?

Absolutely, Rofo has been worth the money and if a broker’s not using it, they’re losing money, they’re losing leads.

Map view and radius search are two great search features on Rofo. Occasionally, listing view doesn’t provide quite enough information, especially if you are not familiar with a location. This is where the map view search function can help. It allows you to target your search geographically and see a more dynamic representation of office space search results.

If you want a more focused commercial listing search, use the Rofo Radius Search tool. This allows you to display only the listings within a certain distance from an address. Want your office to be near a certain highway, public transportation or other amenity? Then search for an address near it and Rofo Radius Search will display listings within your specified distance.

To use the map view, just click on the “Map View” tab at the top of any search results page. This will take you to a map of that city and the icons represent all the buildings with listings. The Radius Search Tool is located in the left sidebar search tool. Just click on the Radius search tab at the top of the window and type in the address in an area you want to locate your office. Then those commercial spaces will be displayed in the search results for you to review.

We’ll be introducing some great new features and an even simpler design in the coming weeks. The number of entrepreneurs and small businesses using Rofo to search for office space continues to grow. We’re listening to your feedback and incorporating into the site.

In the world of commercial real estate there’s a lot of room for improvement in the area of content and data.  And when you mention data everyone always goes to research and analytics.  What we think of is data and content related to marketing a commercial space.  Businesses want to understand the characteristics of a space before they go see it.  They also want to know characteristics about the space and building in the context of running a business.

Common questions:

How will my employees commute to this space?

Are there local amenities?

How good is the building security?

Rofo is aggressively encouraging and promoting the use of video to market office space. The reason is that we’ve witnessed incredible results for both businesses and landlords when video is used.  Office space listings like the one at 182 2nd Street in San Francisco are getting far more views and inquiries.  We will soon be showcasing the listings with video on Rofo knowing the help it provides to both parties.

Rofo was recently included in a story about the market for San Francisco office space.  The story line is still the same - doom and gloom for the landlords and professionals who rely on commercial real estate transactions to make money.  To sum it up: as a business/entrepreneur you are in the driver’s seat.  You can now succeed at getting a short term deal, cheaper rents and other concessions like free rent and allowances.  But obviously the deals are attractive because the overall business climate is in the dumps.  So what to do?  If you have a lease expiring in the next 12 months now is a good time to start evaluating your options.  Just like its a very good time to hire its also a very good time to either negotiate and lock in a low rent in your current office space or shop around and upgrade your diggs.

San Francisco Commercial Real Estate is a Buyer’s Market in Downturn from VidSF on Vimeo.

If you perform a search for small San Francisco Office Space (less than 1,000 sqft) on Rofo you’ll find many compelling options.   These spaces tend to be short term, furnished and ready to go.  All very important things for an entrepreneur in today’s environment.  But remember not all square feet are created equal.  Depending on the layout and actual usable square feet you’ll fit somewhere between 2 and 5 people in a 1,000 feet.

The team over at Alltop has added our blog to their virtual magazine rack of real estate blogs

The site is a very good resource for easily finding the top content in many categories.  I’m personally a fan of real estate and small business.

Besides negotiating the rental rate for your new commercial space, there are other creative ways to minimize your overall financial commitment  in your lease agreement.  I recently had the opportunity to contribute an article to Gigaom highlighting 8 of them.  It ranges from capping operating expenses to obtaining flexible subleasing rights.  Naturally a lot of this depends on market conditions and available commercial real estate listings.

This weekend we pushed an updated version of our search results functionality.  Now you can simply plug in an address (might be your home or an existing office location) and find all commercial real estate listings within a defined radius.  Most people have an idea where they want to locate their business.  Radius search gets you to the available options even quicker than before.

Stay tuned for more website changes and improvements to come over the next few weeks

I’ll be participating in a discussion this week about Technology and the impact on Commercial Real Estate.  The event is being sponsored by the folks at First American Title Company www.ncs.firstam.com/norcal as part of the San Francisco Investment Forum.  This is obviously a very broad topic but in our market niche we’re seeing how user generated content and social interaction on Rofo are enabling businesses, brokers and landlords make relevant and timely connections.

The event starts at 11:30am on September 10 at Embarcadero 4, San Francisco.