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General

Unconditional Satisfaction Guarantee

We are a small and young service that is entirely funded by our users. No fancy world-domination plans, no deep-pocketed venture capitalists doing the fund-ten-hope-one-works game. We are very much looking for the community of users to make up the service as well as fund us to keep us going and growing.

That is why we are extremely focused to meet or exceed our users’ expectations. And deliver every day a satisfaction with their participation in the OpenComps’ community, through data or monetarily. It is something that we’ve taken as self-evident and true from the start, but recently we thought we reinforce it and make it more prominent. We have updated our sign up pages to highlight that if you are for whatever reason not satisfied with your OpenComps PRO subscription, you can contact us within a decent period (say 30 days) to cancel your subscription and receive a full refund. While it is a “no-questions-asked” deal, we would really appreciate any feedback that you can provide us so that we can hopefully address your concerns and improve the service for you, and for everyone else.

We often get asked whether we offer a trial period. We don’t have such functionality currently (maybe in the future), mostly because we believe that the site’s service is pretty transparent (basic registration is free) and, we hope, one could pretty accurately see the benefits of a subscription. However, we stand by this unconditional satisfaction guarantee and see that as our trial offer. If you sign up for a PRO subscription and the service (or really the additional benefits) turn out not up to your expectations, just let us know and we will issue you a full refund.

As stated in the beginning, the entire service is made possible by the generous backing of all the PRO subscribers and we want to extend a very heartfelt THANK YOU to all current and past subscribers. If you haven’t tried a subscription, we hope you do soon.

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General

Tag… you’re it!

Among the many new features we have been quietly launching in the past month, we really hope you embrace this one: tagging yourself in transactions!

At OpenComps, we are very keen to give credit where credit is due in putting these transactions together. It’s not easy, and we know it. That’s why from the beginning we tracked the Owner’s and Buyer’s Brokers and tried to highlight their ranking for the current year and prior. But those were the firms that were being tracked and highlighted. Now, we want to take the credit assignment to the real source: the people… to you!

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General

OpenComps at 8! Happy Anniversary.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! And Happy 8th anniversary to OpenComps! On May 5, 2006, OpenComps officially launched after over a year of development. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 8 years since then.

Of course, our first 6.5 years were mostly spent in sort of prototype state and real work on the service started in earnest only 1.5 years ago, but that heavily discounts the countless hours we put in maintaining a good data (especially in the hotel sector), maintaining 99.9% uptime and keeping the bugs away for those first 6.5 years.

We are very excited of the progress we have made over the past 1+ year and we really appreciate the support we have received from all of our users. Special thanks to all of our PRO subscribers who keep the lights on and ensure that the next 8 years will be even more epic than the first. We hope you join us for the journey!

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General Updates

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

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.

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General Updates

PRO Feature Review: MyOC

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.

MyOC My Comp Sets

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General Updates

Feature Review: Trends & Charts

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

Find Trends & Charts

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General Updates

NEW: Listings on OpenComps

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.

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General

2013 Top U.S. Brokers

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.

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General

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

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.

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General Updates

Introducing Tools

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.