RPR Commercial Brings It

Guest contributor Bill Rovillo of iMapp shares this post from his blog.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Kristen Carr of RPR recently at the Ft. Lauderdale REBar Camp, sponsored by the Greater Ft. Lauderdale REALTORS. Kristen and I basically play in the same sandbox, just for different companies. We have become friendly competitors as of late.

We had heard of the RPR beta version for commercial practitioners but never had the opportunity to see anything more than a few snippets here and there from their on-line videos on the RPR blog. So when I saw that Kristen had a free minute at REBar, being a former “commercial guy” myself, I jumped at the chance to see what she was up to. And then……..wow.

Kristen breezed easily through the site with me. My mind drifted back to the early ’80?s when I was in Washington D.C. leasing commercial space. “Man, I wish I had this back then” was the recurring theme playing over and over in my mind.

She showed me the RPR detailed location analysis report. A drive time report section. Market conditions, the economy and trend reports are also available. I saw great information for site selection and then my favorite- the Business Opportunity analysis report. All great stuff.

The Biz Opp report to me (well, not me anymore, but to you, the commercial practitioner) was golden. A real gem. Imagine being able to show your client data that will represent the best location to place their business. The Biz Opp report does this. It will steer you and your client to make the “best location decision”, as opposed to the “best price decision”, which rarely are the same. With this type of information available, a commercial broker can help businesses, big or small, make the most informed decision on where the business should ultimately be located. While residential brokers have to deal with price, proximity of schools and the like for their clients, commercial folks deal with something much bigger. The viability of a business. And the welfare of the employees of that business. Talk about pressure!

If you practice commercial real estate, I think the RPR commercial system is a tool you need in your arsenal. In fact, I liked the system’s upside so much, I have offered to provide a record-to-record link directly from our iMapp system to the RPR Commercial system so their clients can gain access more easily to their incredibly intuitive system . It is a must have for anyone in this space, trust me. Kristen said she would run the offer up the flagpole so hopefully we’ll make this a reality for our mutual clients in the near future. I think an iMapp/RPR Commercial integration creates a powerful all-in-one tool that will enable commercial brokers to have access to the best data sets available and make them better at what they do. And I’m all about that.

To learn more about iMapp and RPR, visit our product directory. To read the original post, visit the iMapp blog.