As president of NH CIBOR, I also have the distinct pleasure to serve as the president of New England Commercial Property Exchange (NECPE). For those not familiar, NECPE is a database of over 6000 commercial properties, leasable units, and businesses in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. It is THE databases for commercial real estate in Northern New England. As president of NECPE, they also double my salary, which is great! But the best part is I have the pleasure to announce that NECPE has reached a long term agreement with our data vendor Catylist.
It was not too long ago that NECPE elected to transition the back bone of its database to Catylist for a three year term and those three short years came to a close. Thanks to the backing of the NECPE Board a long term agreement was reached to ensure that NECPE will be a dominant force in commercial real estate in New England in the future.
Among the items that the organizations would like to focus, is the increased exposure of our members' listings throughout the internet and also more locally. Currently when you place a listing in the databases, you have a multiplier effect as the listing has the ability to go to 12 other sites including LinkedIn, CIMLS, Google and others. Increased local traffic is the goal for 2012 and 2013. Local sites like Prosper NH and the city of Londonderry currently use NECPE as their database, so if your property falls within their territory, you get additional exposure. If you know of any economic development corporation or any city that would like to advertise commercial listings and increase exposure for our listings, let Allison Ropes or I know.
In addition as part of our agreement with Catylist look for more exposure of Catylist in our local market in the form of training and business development. Their team has fantastic educators who we look to deliver in person and via the web so that our broker members and their office administrators can get the most value out of the system. Be on the lookout for more training notices to come.
Because of these improvements and others we are looking to grow the base of membership above and beyond where we are today. If you are currently a member, make sure you are including these numbers in your discussions with your owner clients. If you are not a member, what on earth is holding you up? Over 6,000 listings in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. 2,500 of those are sale properties. Over 100 businesses currently for sale. NECPE receives over 10,000 visits per month with each of those visitors searching an average of 10 properties. The sale and lease data continues to become more and more robust. The best part about the entire service.... It is all one flat annual price.
Look here for more information about the improvements NECPE is making to the system and we hope to see you online. Also, if you order now, we will throw in a set of steak knives! Seriously, we hope you see the value and if you have improvements you would like to see in the system, our phones are always open, operators are standing by.
Chris Norwood, CCIM, is the 2012 president of the NH CIBOR chapter and is a director of NAI Norwood Group, Bedford.