Owners rep and property manager Micah of Metrovation in San Francisco sits down with Rofo and explains why he uses the site to list commercial space online.

What Micah likes about Rofo is that it produces quality tenant leads and is a great platform for listing spaces and connecting with prospective tenants online.

Interview
I’m Micah Bycel, I work for Metrovation. I’m an owners rep and property manager.

Is Rofo a good marketing tool?

Yeah, Rofos been great. It’s given us an ability to outsource part of our obligation in terms of getting our listings out to the world. We’ve found Rofo to be extremely reliable in putting our listings out there.

Does rofo generate quality leads?

Yeah, I think the first three leads we got, two of the three closed deals with us.

Is Rofo.com easy to use?

Absolutely, I mean the interface is really easy to use, so uploading the listings and everything is really easy and then its sort of taken over from there which is great. So, in terms of how it works in the deal, we’ve found it to be very clear and easy.

Does the Rofo craigslist flyer work well?

Yeah, I mean I think Rofo does a good job of walking that line between too fancy and you know, just sort of random text in craigslist. And so I think it presents a presentable flyer, but that doesn’t overload you with information that people don’t care about, and makes it very easy to read.

The future of commercial leasing?

Yeah, I think the commercial real estate world in general has been slow on the uptake in terms of technology changes. I think Rofo is probably at the forefront of it, we’ve been posting on craigslist for a long time, but I think what we’re doing now with Rofo in our overall strategy is sort of figuring out where are the leads going to come from. For example, is Rofo going to take care of internet leads, and the brokers will take care of leads from the brokerage community. I guess the short answer is I still think its just all getting sorted our right now.

Would you recommend Rofo?

Yeah, definitely. We’re using it as part of our platform to get our listings out. We still rely primarily on our brokers to list a space, to get it out in the brokerage community, to do tours and to bring us deals. But, we’ve found Rofo to be a really reliable component to our leasing strategy.

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.

Local Oakland building owner Norman Eggen describes his success using Rofo to lease commercial space. After listings his spaces on Rofo, Norm began to receive quality tenant inquiries and was able to fill half his building with Rofo users. Norm specifically like that Rofo helps fill a niche for marketing smalls spaces. The problem that Norm has witnessed is that brokers sometimes avoid working on small deals, so Rofo is a great platform to get small commercial spaces leased.

Interview
I’m Norm Eggen, I’m the owner along with my wife of this building at 4721 Tidewater Ave. in Oakland. The reason I’m doing this for Rofo, they’ve been instrumental in helping me find fifty percent of the last tenants I’ve had for the park. They’ve been providing a good service to me to me at what I figure is relatively cost effective basis. And they have brought tow tenants who are right now in the process of finishing up their tenant improvements.

How does Rofo compare to other online resources

Well, one thing I probably should say, and could say for your benefit is the other servives I’ve gotten zero prospects out of it, and the prospects have come from [Rofo]. Brokers working in this area don’t like to work on smaller tenants like this, so Rofo fills a gap to help bring in tenants in the smaller end of the user spectrum.

Would you recommend Rofo?

Yeah, I can strongly say that I would recommend Rofo to other people that have similar types of space they want to lease, or perhaps sell and in fact I have recommended them to more than one other building owner already, so it’s a good service.