Everyone and everything is going online, and so will real estate.
Teleres, an electronic delivery system that will provide real estate professionals with a range of real estate information in a central location, is expected to start this fall.
The Windows-based system will provide users with data from local property markets, financial performance of individual properties, historical valuation analysis and news and briefings on national real estate trends.
Teleres will be interactive, so users can model different scenarios to help make decisions. The effort is being led by Phillip Jennings, former chief executive officer of Landauer Associates Inc. Teleres is an alliance between New York-based Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and AEGON USA, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
In addition to its Jersey City, N.J., headquarters, Teleres also has a technology research and development center in Dayton, Ohio.
Mr. Jennings began the efforts to centralize real estate information in 1985. The culture of the industry - secretive and operated by entrepreneurs - is the highest hurdle facing Teleres.
"The first phase is to convince the commercial real estate industry to share data," said Mr. Jennings. "We need to change the culture of the industry."
Anonymity will be maintained with the use of masking procedures, said Mr. Jennings.
"Once the culture starts to change.....the next challenge is to look at standardization."
Mr. Jennings cautions Teleres doesn't want to set the accounting and performance measuring standards for the real estate industry. Teleres will merely provide the forum for setting those standards.
Part of Teleres' strategy is to acquire other analytical tools, and earlier this year the company bought REITRAC, a real estate information and research firm in Nutley, N.J.
REITRAC's chief product is REITRACdb, an interactive database and analytic tool.
The REITRAC database allows the user to get access to financial statements, management structures, property profiles, economic and demographic data, and comparative benchmarks.
REITRAC founder Joyce Geiger so far has collected data on almost all of the 7,000 or so real estate investment trust properties. Information is collected primarily by REITRAC staff using corporate 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K reports; annual reports; public relations announcements; and direct contacts with property managers, brokers and market research firms.
The company also uses reputable third-party contributors such as the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, which is the REIT industry trade group, and consultants and broker/dealers.
The database is available through a Bloomberg Financial Markets on-line terminal or on disk, although a user will need Microsoft Corp.'s Excel 5.0 spreadsheet software.
