Author: Svetlin

New Home Page. More Free Comps!

Post author By Svetlin
Post date May 1, 2014

Happy May 1st! With spring firmly settling in, we did some spring cleaning. We washed the windows in the office and also decided to update your window into OpenComps by updating our front page. We are very happy with our new look and we hope you like it too!

As the image above showcases, don’t forget that we work hard to make sure we look (and work!) great on the desktop AND on smaller screens like your tablet and phone (yes, we are partial to Apple products, but we do work across all desktops, tablets and phones; but, please, pretty please, update your Internet Explorer 8 browser – we will look/work better and you’ll be safer).

Probably the much bigger news – despite the fact that we truly are very happy with our new home page – is the second part of this announcement: more FREE comps for everyone! Starting today, all user-generated comps will be available in full detail for free to all registered users. We think that’s fair – you contribute the comps (remember, you can contribute with just a free Basic account), everyone gets to see them and benefit from your generosity. This, in effect, brings us back to our roots as a free exchange of comps contributed and managed by the community.

So what do you get with a PRO subscription? All OpenComps’ research-generated comps (that’s our researchers uncovering and researching comps) will remain available only to PRO subscribers. Also, PRO subscribers continue to enjoy the full functionality of the site including field-specific search, creating and managing comps in comps sets, exporting comps in Microsoft Excel-compatible format, sophisticated filters and other advanced tools and functions we have and will continue to develop. Additionally, if you want to find a buyer, lender or JV equity partner for your property, as a PRO subscriber you can post unlimited For Sale, Seeking Debt or Seeking Equity listings. Not the least, your PRO subscription supports us to continue to develop and enhance the OpenComps’ experience and functionality.

We spend a lot of time uncovering and researching comps. So we think it’s fair that we get rewarded for this activity. However, our true vision is for the community at large to uncover and contribute comps, while we spend our efforts on creating sophisticated tools that give everyone insight into the data that everyone gathers, like our Trends and Charts or Browse By tools. We hope you decide to contribute comps that you know so that everyone can benefit and everyone gets more FREE comps!

Tags new feature, update

Updates

Now 3x faster!

Post author By Svetlin
Post date March 24, 2014

Last Friday (3/21/14), we rolled out an upgrade on our hosting package, by moving our service to a solid-state-drive (SSD) server platform (our apologies for some intermittent glitches in service on Saturday). Our hosting provider claims an increase in both page loading and database interactions of up to 300% compared to our pervious platform. While we haven’t got all technical and whisked out the stopwatch, we do feel the site is quite zippier and we hope you do too! We value speed very much and we strive hard to deliver the best performance to our users. We hope you join us!

Tags server, update

General Updates

NEW: Export, Keyboard shortcuts, Local Amount/Currency and Thousands Separator

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

Besides large new features – such as Listings and Trends & Charts – the last few months have brought a steady stream of other system improvements. We have just been a little quiet about them. However, they have significantly increased our efficiency in updating or working with the database as well as brought along exciting new functionality. Here, we will focus on four new features which we find the most interesting.

Tags new feature, tutorial

General Updates

PRO Feature Review: MyOC

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

An often overlooked feature of OpenComps is MyOC – the ability to create custom set(s) of transactions so you can look at their aggregate statistics, export them en masse or map them together. This functionality is available only to PRO subscribers. Let’s us take a closer look.

Tags features, tutorial

General Updates

Feature Review: Trends & Charts

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

While we touched on this new feature in our 2013 year-end review, let’s take a more in-depth look at Trends & Charts.

Tags features, tutorial

General Updates

NEW: Listings on OpenComps

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 12, 2014

Since we are done with the wrap up for 2013 (here and here), we want to start charting the future of OpenComps for 2014. We have a few ideas on where we want to take our service next. We really hope you’ll like them and continue to follow us on this journey. We are always open to new ideas, so don’t be shy to get in touch.

As we mentioned in our introduction of the Tools section, we have always been about more than just following completed transactions. We really want to be the technological platform for cracking the institutional real estate marketplace open, transparent and functioning fluidly. So, in addition to helping people assess a market by searching for comps, we also want to help them with finding out what’s For Sale or who is Seeking Debt or Seeking Equity. All in our trademark no-fuss OpenComps style – blazing fast search, intuitive controls, “nothing but the meat,” instant statistics and customized data sets.

Today, we would like to officially introduce our new service: Listings. OpenComps PRO subscribers can post unlimited For Sale, Seeking Debt or Seeking Equity listings on OpenComps, while registered OpenComps users – for free – can view and search them. Just hit the “+ Add New” button and select your listing type.

Tags hotel, listings, office, residential, retail

General

2013 Top U.S. Brokers

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 10, 2014

Continuing with the 2013 wrap up, let’s take a look at the year’s most active sell-side brokerage firms. As we pointed out in our year-end review, last year was a super active year. That means there were plenty of happy faces at the nation’s top brokerage firms.

Tags 2013, hotel, office, residential, retail, statistics, top brokers

General

2013: Year In Review (and Introducing Trends & Charts)

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 7, 2014

When we set about to write the 2013 review and compile the data – as any good writer – we reviewed our 2012 post. And we realized we were probably going to finish our 2013 piece with the same wish: “to bring our subscribers a more visual and immediate way to better understand the trends that are occurring in OpenComps’ dataset.” And we didn’t want to make the same promise twice. So we stopped writing reviews and started writing code!

Today – together with our 2013 review – we are proud to announce the new Trends & Charts section (see here for hotel, office, retail or multifamily). Currently, you can find it in our Browse By section (dropdown) together with the other data aggregation screens. And we are making it open for every one, reserving for our PRO Subscribers the advanced features such as filtering, longer time period (20 years) and advanced chart tools such as data zoom and save to PNG. This charting tool combined with its extensive search filter can produce really outstanding data insights. We hope you will consider unlocking it’s full potential with a PRO subscription.

And now onto our 2013 review. The chart that follows gives you a quick overview.

Tags 2013, hotel, office, residential, retail, review, stati

General Updates

Introducing Tools

Post author By Svetlin
Post date November 6, 2013

At OpenComps, in addition to recording transactions, we would like to provide you with the tools to close transactions or understand them better. Introducing our new Tools section!

In this new section, we offer templates for underwriting transactions (DCF valuation, project IRR), building or presenting cash flows, evaluating development projects, analyzing competitive sets, understanding performance-driven management agreements, and other transaction-related, professional tools and documents. We launched with a few tools but we plan to continuously update this section with more tools, so check it regularly.

Tags new feature, tools, update

Updates

“Stay signed in”

Post author By Svetlin
Post date October 24, 2013

Three simple words. A login feature you’ve probably seen across the web and don’t even think about it. Well, at OpenComps, we were painfully slow to implement it. And, as the number one request, we heard it loud and clear from all of you that while the design of our login page is nice and dandy, you were staring at it a bit too often. Dread no more as we finally turned the feature live this week. Now, you’ll be seeing a lot less of the login screen (if you so choose) and focus on your work a little more.

Tags new feature, update