Technology & E-commerce (excerpt)

By Debra Hazel

August 2000, Vol. 21, Issue 8

From multimillion-dollar financings to staplers, it’s all there on the World Wide Web — if you know where to look.

But ask any Internet B2B owner whether a real estate professional knows where to look, and the answer almost always is “no.” The real estate industry, and the shopping center end of it in particular, has always been a little slow to invest in new technologies.

“This is the last holdout of the last industry to explore technology,” said Dan Bercu of the leasing-oriented site PropertyFirst.com, acknowledging the industry’s history of working from gut instinct. “Retail probably has been the most primitive. But now people are applying a scientific approach.”

History is not the only reason behind the industry’s slow march to modernity: Too busy conducting their main business to surf the Internet for specialized sites, most shopping center owners/managers/brokers simply are not aware of what products and services are available in cyberspace to make their lives easier.

Yet in the past five years (and in many cases, the past five months), the number of Web sites launched to serve the basic business needs of those in retail real estate has grown dramatically. Services offered on these sites range from construction management to tenant databases, from office supply procurement to financing. A few sites are exclusive to the shopping center industry, but most provide services to all forms of real estate, and to retailers.

On the following pages readers will find the “SCT Industry Guide to the Web” — preliminary information on sites offering goods and services that can be purchased or used via the Web in three categories: leasing, finance and services (both to the professional and the customer). Corporate informational sites are excluded, as are sites under development but not yet in business at press time.

The listings in this section are by no means comprehensive. Many more sites undoubtedly exist, or will shortly, which can help a shopping center professional do his or her work more quickly or easily.

But you won’t know unless you look.

Finance

While the development and even the leasing of a shopping center usually has a beginning and an end (at least for a while), it can seem that financing springs eternal. Finding the funding for a shopping center — whether it is new, being refinanced or redeveloped — can be as time-consuming and frustrating as the building process itself. Developers must research lending institutions, fill out myriad applications and make multiple presentations, usually in person, to get the dollars vital to creating their vision.

No longer. Several Web sites have been launched that will match a development with lending institutions looking to invest in such projects. Some sites can handle the entire process online, while others will make an initial match and then leave the companies to work out details on their own.

Most of the following commercial real estate financing sites are so new that they have yet to fund a shopping center, though with lenders including JP Morgan and Prudential, retail funding is only a matter of time and criteria.

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Oinke.com: The name for this site actually comes from the savings its founder believes borrowers would realize. When asked by his young son where that money would go, he answered, “In their piggy bank.” The boy then dubbed the company Oinke (pronounced oink-ee). This financing site, founded last year and launched in February, reverses the usual financing process by helping the borrowers choose lenders: Developers enter their criteria, creating one loan package; lenders then bid on financing the center.

“The key difference between us and other sites is the auction model. Some 150 lenders can bid on an individual loan basis,” said Rick Tysdal, senior vice president of marketing. Oinke reviews the packages and matches them to various lender criteria. The borrower has an individual vault to which bids are sent, allowing easy comparisons.

Transactions can range from between $250,000 and $500 million. The lender pays Oinke 0.25% of the loan amount upon closing. At press time, nine loans were in due diligence.

Contact: Rick Tysdal, senior vice president of marketing, Oinke.com, 19800 MacArthur Blvd./Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92612; Phone: (949) 784-8700;

Web site: www.oinke.com; E-mail: rick@oinke.com.

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