As you get ready to turn over the calendar and look ahead to 2020, curious what resources you lean on most for professional networking within the commercial real estate industry. Many seem to be present on LinkedIn, but I find it too broad and noisy to be useful within CRE. Most of the offline networks (e.g., NAIOP, ICSC, REBNY, etc.) are only updated a few times per year and are tedious to index/sort/search. Forums like WSO and reddit have industry focus but are mostly anonymous.
I built something to help with this. To use it, you specify what market(s) you focus on and what deals you've done in those markets (across jobs). You can then find and connect with other industry contacts who have overlapping interests and/or who you've worked with on deals. Things it can help with:
- Digitizing your network with minimal manual effort (vs a traditional contact database)
- Summarizing your track record and experience
- Finding people based on specific criteria
- Eventually, showing who has momentum and expertise in certain slices of the market
Please give it a look and also suggest other resources that come to mind. Thanks and Happy New Year!
Hi Ephs05msm, whoops, looks like nobody chimed in here.... maybe one of these discussions below is relevant:
More suggestions...
If those topics were completely useless, don't blame me, blame my programmers...
From looking at the criteria, the platform you created seems to be very comprehensive. Something like this would be helpful in this opaque industry. I wasn't able to search anything, however.
I find that a combination of LinkedIn and real estate articles (for information on deals) to be helpful.
Thanks for taking a look. It's only about a month old, so I haven't recruited many users beyond my local market (Boston). Would you be willing to sign up and set up your markets and some recent deals you've done? I'd love your feedback on how it is to use.
I agree most people are on LinkedIn; it's just really unhelpful for finding anything related to real estate.
With some traction, this product could be a nice identity/reputation layer for the industry. I baked a bunch of privacy settings in so that contact info, targets, and deals can be kept private as needed.
Honestly, the resource I use most is just my contact list. Otherwise, in-person events like ULI meetings and charity golf outings grow it and LinkedIn helps keep track of it.
Anecdotally, most people I know just use their contact list (myself included). My issues with it are:
I tried to make this as lightweight as possible while addressing the above. It's a bit rough around the edges but the core experience of creating markets and deals and then connecting with people based on that feels really good. And I'm not aware of anywhere else this can be done.
Would you be willing to give it a try? Feel free to connect with me on there; my profile is at the bottom of my posts.
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