Loopnet vs Crexi (is Loopnet Legit)

A successful net lease brokerage business may be the dream of many people in this field but it requires you to use the right tools for it. Digital marketplaces like zillow, crexi and loopnet take the stakeholders to advance technology and provide them with the data. There are more than 300,000 U.S. properties for lease or sale on Crexi since the past few years.

Crexi is more detailed and based on AI or machine learning whereas loopnet’s data is more user generated. CRE professionals have much faster and streamline business where they manage and expand accordingly.  So the users who want to avoid financial recession are switching to crexi as they do not have to leave their platform by utilizing their digital services.

While on the other end, loopnet is another website that has been frequently used up till now to sell and buy commercial property. It has relevant information regarding prices, location and square footage. CRE professionals appreciate the high listings visibility, analytics and reports for gaining deeper insight of the area.

Since both of the platforms are working never better than before, how does the hot topic of loopnet vs crexi appear on the surface? The answer to this puzzle is further discussed in this detailed article where you will know the pros and cons of each website.

History:

Loopnet was founded in 1995 and basically as old as the internet itself and purchased by costar in 2011. This flagship now has up to 22 real estate marketing brands under its name. On the other hand, Crexi is relatively new in the market in competition with Loopnet and was founded in 2015 by Mike DeGiorgio.

The former is more established and is recognised since it was in the field for more years than Crexi. If you want to sell property, a lot of users would prefer to do it through loopnet simply because it is older and more trustworthy.

Advantages:

Digging deeper into loopnet it highlights:

1. Huge database
2. An easy to user map locator tool
3. Allows you to buy or lease the auction commercial properties to professionals
4. Detailed listings with in depth description of properties
5. Includes a few photos and 3D tours of some listings with interactive brochures
6. Investors have the option to share their searches with others
7. Filtered keywords can help you search by property type, space, units, years built, square footage, price etc.

Whereas Crexi maintains its decorum through:

1. Easy to use interface
2. Present sin 50 major US metropolitan areas and keeps growing further
3. Hands on customer service
4. Offers brokers to find, manage and qualify leads
5. Customizable emails with market properties
6. In app messaging service to communicate with interested parties
7. Consolidates the entire CRE processes
8. A recession proof platform that brings the platform’s revenue high up with the help of auction services

Disadvantages:

Following the pattern of the credits above, the former website also has some setbacks:

• Loopnet is known to offer only commercial properties while residential ones are not available to even buy, sell or lease.
• There is a small number of commercial listings approximately over 500,000
• This website charges more than a decent amount of fees to upload the listings and upgrade their platform.
• If there is an ROI, it will be small.
• Compared to other CREs, this site has 44% more expensive pricing than others.

Having the competitive edge of an advanced website for property sales, Crexi has fewer setbacks than usual:

• Its data filtering can be more refined than now to give you preferred data only.
• Database size limitations may not meet the needs in all areas.

So it is better to switch to something that gives you more than it takes from you in order to thrive your business. Rather than sticking to somewhere which is only working these days because it has been around for a longer time span.

User interface:

Being a 25 year old website, loopnet may not be as appealing as today’s websites are. It might give you some error messages or keep on being buggy. If you look at crexi, it is more streamlined and user friendly as compared to its competitor. The inventory may be a slight problem for some users as you cannot see the properties up for sale on loop net.

Not for total, but loopnet mentions 1.1 million properties marketed on its platforms on the information and marketing page. Whereas crexi has a live counter which will help you see the sales for real and thus make it more trustworthy. You get to see one by one if you prefer through this counter and see for yourself how many of them are sold or available.

Cost:

Both platforms are programmed to post and browse the listings for free but you can upgrade your experience with a paid membership plan. Crexi reviews really admired the $400 per month for its membership as simply put. This also gives you certain perks like:

• Comps
• Lead generation
• Property records data
• Unlimited access to market reports
• Research trends
• Report generating with information from the data center etc

There are no extra charges to be seen by the users to rank your property higher in the search thanks to crexi. You can only rank once your listings are complete and users are encouraged to add as much data as possible. The unlimited listings is also yet another bonus of this website which is not seen in loopnet.Although it is free to list and search on loopnet, the listing site has 3 packages named as:

• Basic is free to use with the common usages as the website
• Silver requires you to buy a parking spot on the website where a single slot is $178 per month as a long term contract.
• and gold also makes you buy this spot in the same long contracts based on the listings you want on a higher level of exposure. It offers a 6 month contract for $599 per month for 1 listing.

For instance if you have bought 10 silver listings for a month and only sold half of those, you will still be charged for the rest of them. The reason is because your search results are ranked based and not on the search accuracy. You can also see this on the marketing website of loopnet official.

Searching functionality:

For getting accurate results based on your search, this feature is an important one to notice. Your criteria for loopnet search is based on who has more money and is able to put it on the table. But to ignore that for sometime, we will state an example for a single tenant netlist properties on both websites for better understanding.

Doing this among the entire U.S. crexi came up with 167 results whereas loopnet got only 107. And even further noticing, loopnet gave 12 bogus results from the first 60 listings which means that those were not related to the search. After trying and testing, crexi with the same search only gave 2 non search related results.

Sales comps:

Knowing that costar has the greatest database on the sales comp back to 20 years but loopnet does not have a sales comp pitch on the website. You have to pay an additional $500 per month to costar for getting one license. This amount is in addition to what you are already paying for loopnet.

So, you may not need comps for the 20 years back but crexi has just added sales comps with data worth of a few years back. This is pretty much it for what you need the data at the present time with standard regular subscription.

Revenue generation:

There are several ways that Crexi generates revenue which are as follows:

• Getting a subscription based service to brokers so that they can plan to sell or lease real estate.
• Through bidding where Crexi receives a surcharge from any transaction or deal being done.
• Having a precise data and analytics service which enables the users to benefit from this insight into the emerging developments in commercial real estate.

If we look at loop net, it has its own way of doing things since it is longer in business than new comers like crexi. 

• Listed 500 thousand properties that are valued over $425 billion
• Launched its “freemium” business model that offers tiered subscription maintaining an annual recurring revenues of $100 since 2008.
• premium search capabilities and listings on it online platform
• Loopnet has content partnerships with digital publications that cover its paid advertising and premium listings.

Support staff:

Crexi careers hires more than 175 workers as this platform has incredible growth and is continuing to do so. But the best of all is its support staff that will help you with any query on site and gives several options to deal with a situation.

The bottom line:

There is almost nothing you cannot do on Crexi that you can do on loopnet as the former is the result of machine learning. The accuracy is immaculate since the later upgrades and it also offers you on spot services for your higher sales pitch. It is up to the broker or user to completely switch to one platform or alternatively work on both.