Your Doorway to Commercial Property. FREE to List!

FindSpace is offering to setup a FREE Website for anyone promoting Commercial Property.  This can be Real Estate firms and/or private investors.

The site will be setup on Weebly using the available tools and will include all client’s listings from FindSpace as generated by the ClientSpace facility.

A sample site can be seen at McIntosh Realty.

The client must:

• Provide all the text and photo’s
• Place their listings on FindSpace (also FREE)
• Maintain the site once published
• Provide their own Domain Name, if they have one

FindSpace will spend a maximum of two hours configuring the site but will not provide any customization options, only the drag and drop options within Weebly.

New Zealand’s largest office space investor sees a stark contrast in our two largest cities, with a shortage of prime space in Wellington as its new Auckland building lies almost empty.

AMP NZ Office Trust, which owns $1.3 billion in prime office space in Wellington and Auckland, reported a 12 per cent rise in distributable profits to $47 million for the nine months to March 31 yesterday.

Chief executive Rob Lang said despite the backdrop of a weak economy, the trust’s occupancy level in the capital was at 98.6 per cent, with demand from businesses for more.

“There is private sector demand that, at present, we are unable to cater for, such is the level of that demand.”

While there had be a fall in demand from the public sector as government spending was cut, Mr Lang said its only exposure to Wellington was prime space. Its buildings tended to house department headquarters, many of which have expanded recently as functions are centralised. Earlier this month the trust announced that the Department of Corrections had agreed to lease about 11,500 square metres of space in its Mayfair House building, the second-largest lease in its 12-year history.

Mr Lang said its other tenants included the headquarters of the Treasury and the Ministry of Health, and spending cuts were expected to hit other, smaller secondary locations.

“If there is retrenchment in health, then we would expect to see [the Ministry of] Health consolidate in their headquarters.”

Auckland, meanwhile, remained flat, with its new building at 21 Queen Street, completed last September, almost 90 per cent unoccupied. Because of Queen Street, which had its book value cut by $40 million last year, the trust’s occupancy in Auckland is around 80 per cent.

Mr Lang insisted vacancy was a significant problem across the Auckland market and denied the trust had been unrealistic about its expectations for rent at Queen Street.

“We’re being very commercial and happy to meet the market,” he said.

While the level of inquiry at the building had increased, prospective tenants appeared to be using weakness in the market as leverage to gain better terms with existing landlords.

“The property attracts very strong interest in the Auckland market but the deal flow and execution in Auckland is very thin.”

The trust was prepared to be “very flexible” to attract tenants to join real estate company CB Richard Ellis, the Queen Street building’s sole occupant.

“We’ll do the deals in the best interests of the investors in the project, and we’re very flexible in how we package those deals. Once you do have one or two deals it is true that it does create momentum.”

// After writing down the value of its portfolio by $63m in the second half of 2009, the trust made no further change to the book value of its assets this year. Lang predicted in December that the worst was over for asset impairments.

The trust said it was paying a net third-quarter net dividend of 1.475 cents a unit. Last year the trust raised $201m through a rights issue to pay down debt.

Its unit price rose 1c to 75c yesterday.

Source:   http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/3618624/Auckland-offices-vacant-as-capital-feels-the-squeeze

The internet is changing the real estate industry on a daily basis. And, not surprisingly, it’s the Web 2.0 innovators that are leading the revolution. Of course this isn’t the first time that new media gurus have redefined an industry. However, this time around old school brands are being left in the dust, while innovative startups are reaping all the benefits.

New evidence is starting to come to light that Web 2.0 sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com are gaining more traction and market share then nationally franchised brand named sites. To get a better understanding of why these sites are doing so well, lets take a look at four sites in particular. On the Web 2.0 side we are going to discuss Trulia.com and Zillow.com on the brand name side we will take a look at RE/MAX and Century 21.

Zillow is a Web 2.0 web site that provides its visitors with tools and information on the real estate industry along with general real estate search. Founded by the same folks that brought us Expedia.com. It garnered much attention when they briefly snagged Vanessa Fox from the ranks of Google a little over a year ago. However, its not the people alone that has made Zillow a popular place for consumers. Zillow has successfully combined social networking and a wiki style portal with up to date real estate listings and market information. Zillow’s “Discussions” is a forum where consumers can engage with other consumers and real estate professionals on a wide variety of real estate topics. This type of engagement is popular in real estate because it gives the consumer the ability to gather information while keeping a comfortable level of anonymity. For most home buyers anonymity is extremely important in the early stages of real estate search. Social engagement is not the only thing that Zillow is succeeding at. Zillow’s “Real Estate Guide” is a wiki style information portal that is chalk full of articles for all areas of real estate. Offering a resource like this gives Zillow market authenticity and makes content ripe for linkbait. But the truly ingenious aspects of adding a wiki is that all the content is free. While Zillow’s users benefit from collectively creating this content, Zillow reaps the benefits of free original content that is constantly fresh.

Zillow is not the only Web 2.0 company trying to make a go at real estate. Trulia.com combines real estate search with social engagement tools as well. Trulia Voices is an area where homebuyers can ask questions about a specific area or topic. Real estate professionals that specialize in that area then have the ability to respond. This once again is another example of social engagement that is extremely popular. One thing that Trulia has got going that Zillow seems not to have mastered yet, is a very polished understanding of SEO. Trulia is ranking pretty well for highly competitive real estate search terms. While their SEO tactics are extremely aggressive to say the least, in my opinion they do provide engaging content that warrants relevant rankings. And it appears that others are taking notice. Just last month Trulia secured another $15 million in venture capital, that’s comparable to the $15 million that power house startup Twitter landed at the end of April.

We already know that RE/MAX is dominating in the area of brand recognition in web search volume. So its no surprise that remax.com is ranking as the top name brand real estate site. Century 21 comes in second and in the same token is placed as the second most visited name brand real estate site. However both sites are still falling short of these Web 2.0 wonders. Why? You ask? Well in my opinion the two big reasons that these sites aren’t doing as well, is their complete lack of social engagement and their limited understanding/dedication to SEO.

Take a look at remax.com. Here we see a typical real estate search tool. However, when one performs a search they are redirected off their site to a locally owned franchise site. This is great for the local franchise but it means that remax.com has significantly less control over their brand, because each locally owned brokerage depends on a different 3rd party developer for web services. The result is that remax.com’s search tool provides some times unreliable ambiguous results. As for social engagement, the only thing that comes remotely close is a directory of sales associates’ contact information. It appears from my view that the biggest thing RE/MAX has going for it on the internet is name recognition.

Century21.com has put much more time into their search tool. They have been successful at integrating mapping features via Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. And it is safe to assume that their index of listings is significantly larger because they combine all of the listings under their parent company Realogy, who also owns Coldwell Banker, ERA, and Sotheby’s. However, once again they have absolutely no social engagement features besides their directory of sales associates.

So, we have seen that social engagement can be very powerful when it comes to real estate sites. Then, one might ask, why isn’t big name brands like Century 21 and RE/MAX integrating social elements into their systems? Maybe they don’t think they need to. Century 21 for example syndicates all of it’s listing data to a handful of different sites, such as Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, Google Housing Search, and others. With this method Century 21 is letting these sites do all the marketing for them. However, at the same time, this method does little to enable their sales associates to build relationships with homebuyers.

In my opinion to build a strong base of support on the internet that will transfer into offline growth, brand name real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Cenury 21 need to integrate social elements into their preexisting systems that allow for the homebuyer to establish a relationship with their sales associates. Otherwise these companies run the risk of being passed over by a market of consumers that are becoming increasingly more social online.

Source:  http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/school-real-estate-brands-loosing-web-20-innovators/

The office market in Auckland’s central business district is in worse shape than people realise, says Craig Tyson at ING New Zealand, which manages funds worth nearly $300 million in listed New Zealand property.

That’s clearly of concern to Tyson because office buildings account for about 60 percent of the listed property sector; industrial property accounts for about 20 percent and retail property the remainder.

While retail and industrial rents have held up well during the recession, office rents are declining and are probably going to fall further, Tyson says.

The trend for major corporates to move out of prime office buildings into campus-style accommodation at places such as the Viaduct is creating ever-rising vacancies.

Vodafone and Air New Zealand have already moved to the Viaduct while Telecom will move about 2500 staff into its new purpose-built, four-building headquarters on Victoria St next year and ASB Bank wants to move about 1100 staff out of the CBD into a new $160m development on the waterfront within three years.

Westpac and Ernst & Young are moving to Britomart and Bank of New Zealand is also moving.

ANZ National Bank, now occupying nearly half of Kiwi Income Property Trust’s 26,141- square-metre National Bank Centre on Queen St, is also rumoured to be moving.

Its lease expires in 2012.

Kiwi’s building is already 12 percent vacant.

“The trend has been around for a while but we can probably least afford it now,” Tyson says.

“Who’s going to be left in these towers?”

Chas Keogh, office leasing manager at real estate agency CB Richard Ellis, says the vacancy rate in Auckland’s CBD is officially 13.3 percent and, if taking into account sub-leases, it’s probably more than 16 percent.

Keogh agrees 2013 “is going to be a tough year for leasing”, but says the market has seen worse.

In the early 1990s, Auckland’s vacancy rate was about 25 percent and in the late 1990s climbed above 15 percent.

Keogh is clearly an optimist: “What everyone has to take into account is we had a fantastic boom. When you look at where we are now in comparison with where we’ve been, it isn’t actually as bad as people are making it out to be. There are some great opportunities.”

Forsyth Barr analyst Jeremy Simpson, who notes rival real estate agency Colliers is expecting the vacancy rate to climb closer to 20 percent, says while the rate is lower than at the same stage of the cycle in 1991, “we are arguably in worse shape from an economic and employment perspective”.

In past downturns, poor vacant space has been converted to educational uses or into apartments or short-term accommodation, Simpson says.

“It is harder to see such a saviour in today’s climate.”

Still, the super-city’s office space requirements will help and a few large non-CBD tenants are moving back from suburban locations to take advantage of lower rents and previously unavailable large, vacant contiguous floors.

“Perhaps the latter will have more of a positive impact this time around given improved public transport linkages into the city.”

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/small-business/3585130/Firms-turn-backs-on-CBD-towers

In the past few months I’ve noticed a definite trend towards organisations searching for new premises.

A year ago, this was not the case at all. The bulk of our work then was negotiating rent reviews and lease renewals. People were still nervous about making decisions in recessionary times.

What’s also interesting is that we are now seeing more and more new clients who previously would have taken a DIY approach to managing their commercial property leases and negotiations.

Executives are increasingly recognising that property is more and more complex and involves significant risk. They see the value in outside expertise such as that offered by us at Parallel Directions Ltd.

That value is tangible and can be directly related to profitability and direct return on investment.

Take for example a franchise
A franchise holder may have plenty of expertise in the product or service they offer, but know little about the complexities of searching for premises and negotiating a commercial property lease. The biggest pitfalls are the ones people are completely unaware of.

There are known unknowns… things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns… things we do not know we don’t know. It is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
– Donald Rumsfeld

The risks involved really struck home when I told one client that the entire profit from their franchise over the 3 year period of a property lease could be completely wiped out by the tough “make good” clause.

This is the clause that requires a tenant to restore the property to the state it was in when they signed the lease. It can involve huge costs, such as removing partitions and all alterations made during a fit-out, relocating lighting and air conditioning, and painting and redecorating parts of the property that may have changed during the term of the lease.

So while many organisations have personnel with some property management expertise, there are a large number of increasingly complex matters that many are unaware of and therefore unprepared to handle effectively.

As I often say, smart management of property leases can have a significant impact on profitability. In complex and increasingly volatile environments, it pays to have the right expert advice.

Source: http://www.officeblog.co.nz/new-trend-in-commercial-property-leasing