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OpenComps Mailbox: First Step at Social
Among the many new features we implemented on the site this summer, the biggest was the Mailbox – a messaging system for OpenComps’ users to get in touch with each other. It is our first step towards delivering on our premise of being social (crowdsourced, being the first premise!). We are very excited with our final implementation – clean, simple and, hopefully, useful. Follow us along as we run you through some screenshots to demonstrate the Mailbox functionality.
Over the summer, we rolled out quite a few new features (and bug fixes) to OpenComps without really any announcements. We are here to rectify this. Among the many new features, we would like to highlight the new Proximity Search, new fields such as Brand, Property Manager, Lender, Buyer Origin and Owner Origin, new Map tabs in list and transaction views, Related tab in transaction view and a whole new Pagination. There is also a brand new way to communicate with your fellow OpenComps users, but for that we’ll dedicate a separate post. Follow us after the break for a description of the new key features.
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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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Q1’2014 Review: Good Times Continuing
We got busy with new features over the past few months, as you can see from our stream of updates here and here and here, that we got really delayed on our first quarter review. Well, there were no earth-shattering news: the market’s good times continue unabated. Which is nice, isn’t it? We certainly like it. Let’s take a look at the activity in the four sectors we cover.
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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!
As you know, we keep tabs on many public companies through news reports and, more importantly, their SEC filings. Some companies take the word “public” seriously and we really appreciate it. And some companies – while having no problems raising money publicly – have very distorted understanding of what it means to be public. Example #1: Equity Residential (NYSE: EQR).
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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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New Home Page. More Free Comps!
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!
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Now 3x faster!
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!