Commercial real estate database to be searchable online

GOOD INVESTMENT: Jeffrey A. Butler, broker-owner of Butler Realty Group, says that investment properties continue to lead recovery in the housing economy. / COURTESY BUTLER REALTY
GOOD INVESTMENT: Jeffrey A. Butler, broker-owner of Butler Realty Group, says that investment properties continue to lead recovery in the housing economy. / COURTESY BUTLER REALTY

Anyone who’s bought or sold a house recently is probably familiar with the Multiple Listing Service in their state, the database where sales and properties for sale, are listed. But for those interested in commercial real estate – potential buyers, sellers, brokers, bankers and insurers – the residential-based system has never quite fit.
This year a group of real estate professionals in the Rhode Island Association of Realtors and Rhode Island Commercial and Appraisal Board of Realtors have been working on a way to change that. They hired Catalyst Development Corporation to create a new database specifically for commercial properties that will tie into MLS, but have features tailored to commercial listings.
Jeffrey Butler, owner of Butler Realty Group in Warwick, sits on both the RICABOR and MLS boards, and was part of the task force charged with fixing the commercial database issue.
He was named the 2012 RICABOR Commercial Realtor of the Year this past summer.

PBN: What made RICABOR decide a new commercial database was necessary?
BUTLER: We needed a better mousetrap for commercial-property information exchange and either had to improve commercial MLS or replace it. It came down to it being much cleaner and more robust to replace it with a product that’s already out there, in this case a product called Catalyst. It has been an ongoing desire for the organized commercial brokers for the last 20 years.

PBN: How do potential buyers and folks in the industry find properties now?
BUTLER: There are other third-party solicitors/providers that take the information on our properties, repackage it and sell it back to us at a premium, which doesn’t give us control of our information. Here we have a system that is as good or better and it’s designed for the associations to be able to monitor and control the information, much like we do for the residential properties for MLS. Probably 80 percent or more of the residential properties are listed on MLS and through that on riliving.com, and that is the most trafficked website in Rhode Island. With Catalyst, now we have a very robust information set and we will be able to have a portal through RILiving that consumers can now search commercial real estate and obtain much more information than they were able to in the past.

PBN: You expect this will make available more information about commercial properties in Rhode Island, and transaction histories, than has ever been available before?
BUTLER: Yes. It not only gives all the brokers an opportunity to list properties and share information between one another, but it also allows the state or town economic-development departments or chambers of commerce to be part of the same information database. Right now there are a lot of phone calls and emails back and forth asking, «constant “What do you have here? What do you have there?” both from other brokers and economic development of municipalities and the state, and a lot of fragmented information. This allows the platform to pull all those fragments together and have one consistent, shared database.

PBN: When do you expect it to go live?
BUTLER: We are working on a beta site now and expect it to be live by December. At that point there will be thousands of properties we will pull over from current MLS – they will also stay on current MLS – and duplicated on the new Commercial Information Exchange, as well as all the comps and solds and leased properties – a decade’s worth of those. In addition, there is also another third-party vendor who works with Catalyst pouring thousands more comps from their third-party database, which will be a huge resource.

PBN: What are you seeing in the market, especially in your backyard in Kent County? Signs of hope?
BUTLER: I think we are rising out of the ashes and activity has been way up for the last couple of months. We are actually signing deals. Talking to brokers across state, they are seeing the same thing. Confidence is up and people are feeling more positive and committing to deals. This time last year they were looking and kicking around. «constant ****SLps» Now we are seeing them pulling their hands out of their pockets and making commitments leasing and buying properties.

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PBN: Any segment in particular leading the way?
BUTLER: Investment properties have led it from the beginning: multifamily and all types of income property. Second to that we are seeing more office activity, which is good. I think it is up across the board, industrial and retail. The biggest problem we still have is finding quality investments that numbers work on, but the sellers are starting to get more realistic with the numbers they are asking for. The huge disconnect from buyers to sellers is starting to thin. The lenders I think are also being more aggressive and more realistic with their lending practices so we are not having as much trouble financing deals. The Small Business Administration has been really aggressively lending.

PBN: As big-box stores get smaller, who is going to fill some of the large, underutilized, suburban shopping-center spaces in Rhode Island?
BUTLER: I think we will find other retailers to fill them. You are seeing some creative re-use for them, such as gyms. They are subdividing some of them into smaller spaces. •

INTERVIEW
Jeffrey A. Butler
Position: Broker-owner of Butler Realty Group
Background: Working in construction from an early age, Butler realized there was more money to be made on the transaction end of real estate than on the building end. He received his real estate license in 1977.
Education: Graduated from Toll Gate High School in Warwick in 1976
First job: paper route
Residence: Coventry
Age: 54

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