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Shopping Centers Today -> November 2001
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SITE SELECTION
Jones Lang LaSalle’s Property Watch uses Web to link buyers, sellers and brokers
By Dave Bodamer
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Amid a meltdown of many e-commerce sites, for Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) the Internet has turned into a powerful tool.
While some companies’ Web sites became tails that wagged the dog, JLL’s creation, Property Watch, has become an effective, and much used, extension of the company’s brokerage business.
“Property Watch is not its own different thing,” said John T. Suzuki, JLL vice president of land services. “It’s just one part of a total package and approach.”
Developed by JLL’s Capital Markets Group, Chicago, Property Watch is designed to save everyone’s time by offering customized information to buyers, sellers and JLL’s own brokers. To start with, it enables prospective buyers to get information on properties before speaking with a JLL representative and, to help the broker, they can fill out a profile of the types of projects that interest them.
For sellers, the site provides another resource to advertise a property besides print media, direct mailing and listing services. And for JLL, Property Watch is another avenue for its customers to get information on properties for sale, and to track the status of a transaction instantly, instead of relying on the mail or telephone.
As such, while many others measured the usefulness of their Web sites by the number of hits they received, the purpose of Property Watch is not to generate attention, but rather to help JLL and its customers do what they have always done, only more efficiently.
“It’s not important how many hits we get; it’s important that we have qualified users,” said Suzanne Martinez, an associate at JLL. “We’d rather have 30 qualified individuals than just some exorbitant amount of individuals coming through the site.”
Prospective buyers can search the Web site’s database by property type or location. Moreover, they can create a “Watchlist” of properties they are interested in pursuing; this enables them to be informed of any changes in the status of real estate they have listed when they log onto the site. Sellers, meanwhile, can track the progress of the offering.
While buyers and sellers are confined to areas of the site that concern them, JLL, of course, can track everything. It can search a database of prospective purchasers, review profiles and view an archive containing property and sales information on past deals broken down by different teams.
At
press time 1,400 registered buyers had used Property Watch and 22
companies had sold properties on it. Retail clients include Kimco
Realty Corp., Wal-Mart Stores and Target Corp.
“When we started with this, people would tell us that large institutional investors and major corporations would never use something like this,” Suzuki said. “People said, ÔThey like to be hand-held in every step of the transaction.’ That’s false. We have major institutional investors engaged in every part of the site.”
Suzuki stressed that the tool is not meant to replace human interaction in deals, but to enhance it.
“It’s not that we want to totally automate the process or that we do not want to speak with clients,” he said. “Everyone has the ability to talk with us anytime they want to during a deal.”
In addition to clients in urban markets, Property Watch has attracted users in rural areas, which Suzuki said was surprising.
“We’ve done deals in markets as small as Winchester, Ky.,” Suzuki said. “That was with a broker and a buyer and it was done virtually completely with Property Watch.”
Giantstep, a division of Leo Burnett, Chicago, designed, programmed and hosts the site for JLL, and JLL mines the data from Property Watch through the use of business intelligence software developed and customized by Chicago-based Cognos. Each night, the software searches the server and creates a report of users that have created new profiles, ordered sales materials or posted properties on their Watchlist. The software is primarily used for reporting sales activity to the client and for creating contact lists for JLL’s brokers.
Currently the site is primarily used by JLL’s Small Asset Transactions Group, but as it is refined, it will be at the disposal of JLL’s offices worldwide. JLL also plans to increase the site’s functionality by adding online bidding, due diligence materials and additional tools to help clients in the acquisition and leasing of property.
“I haven’t seen anything that compares to what we’re doing,” Suzuki said. “It’s just part of a total package and approach that we want to have for our clients.”
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