By harnessing the power of the internet there are ways you can get an advantage over your competitors, a head start in your search for commercial real estate could be the difference between securing a property & missing out completely.

The internet has exploded in popularity in recent years with older generations now embracing the net and upgrading their online skills, there are still methods savvy net users can use to get an advantage over the masses though.

You can use alerts and other free website tools to get notifications sent to you as soon as new properties hit the market, if you know where to look and how to use the tools, you can secure the premium commercial properties before anyone else even knows they are on the market.

Commercial real estate search – tricks and tips

  • Use alerts to get new listings before your competition
  • Filter the results properly to show new properties not paid listings
  • Use google alerts to keep an eagle eye on the entire market

Commercial property alerts

The website www.realcommercial.com – largely regarded as the most popular commercial real estate website, you can set alerts so you get sent an email notification if a commercial property comes on the market that matches your pre-defined criteria.

To set alerts you need to do a lease or sale search in the suburb you are interested in.

Once your search results have loaded, in the left side of the screen in the light blue section, there is an option to “get email alerts” click the tab and a registration box will pop-up, once you have registered you will get a confirmation email and password.

Sign into your new account and a new tab “myrealcommercial” will appear at the top right hand side of the website.

Once in your account you may want to change the frequency of the emails,  immediately – daily – weekly etc depending on how actively you are searching.

Real Estate Filters

The other powerful feature on most websites these days is the filter option.

Using realcommercial.com as an example again, go ahead and do your for sale/lease search.

Once the results are up, you will notice the very top results are wrapped in a thick blue border – these are the premium results.The commercial real estate agent has paid to have these listings appear at the top of the search results to get the most views possible for that property.

If you scroll down, eventually you will come to some slightly different results.

These are still wrapped in a blue border but the border is thinner than the previous results – these are still paid results, they are the next level down from the premium paid results.

Continue scrolling down and eventually you will come to results that have no border at all – these are the organic or non-paid listings.

It can be helpful to filter these results so you instantly get the newest properties on the market at the top of the results rather than the big budget results that are paid to sit at the top of the search results.

Just above the list of results, there is a blue box that shows the number of pages that are available – to the left of the page numbers there is another tab “sorted by” with a drop down box next to it – click on the arrow and this list of options will appear.

  • Featured (default paid results at the top)
  • Price (high-low)• Price (low-high
  • Date (newest-oldest)
  • Date (Oldest-newest)

Select one of the options depending on your preference (in our case newest-oldest) and bingo the newest commercial properties will now show up at the top of the results page rather than the paid listings.

You will need to do this every time you do a new search, as the default option will automatically bring up the paid results next time you do a search.

If you want to receive alerts both for sale and for lease listings you will need to do the process again but make sure you do a search for lease rather than for sale or vice versa.

Enlisting googles to help you find commercial real estate

If you want to monitor the entire commercial property market rather than just a single website you can set up alerts to come to you directly from google.

Go to www.google.com/alerts  or www.google.com.au/alerts (for Australia)

  • enter a search term  – Your suburb (Osborne Park for example)
  • Type – the kind of media you want to receive (everything is the safe option)
  • How oftern – select eh frequency you wish to receive alerts, daily, weekly etc
  • Volume – all results

Deliver to – enter the email address you want the alerts to go to – then hit create alert and your done!

Again you will receive a confirmation email, click the link to confirm you have requested the alert and you can start receiving alerts from Google.