Minnov8

As the Internet increasingly becomes a platform upon which entrepreneurs and opportunists build disruptive and inefficiency crushing innovative Web applications, organizations like GoFishCommercial will emerge to do exactly that and make the inefficient, efficient.

After hearing about the company and taking the time to poke around the site, I had the chance to talk with Asher Silber, VP of Sales & Marketing for GoFishCommercial, in order to understand their current deliverable and a bit more about where they’re headed.

Kristi Oman (commercial real estate developer and property owner) and husband Zev, looked at the simplicity and effectiveness of Craigslist and knew they could build and deliver a site that would match that and add significant value to both the search process by buyers as well as to the owners of commercial real estate and their brokers.

What is particularly intriguing and innovative, however, is how GoFishCommercial has aligned the incentives of buyers, property owners and brokers, and done so in a disruptive and efficient way.

Kristi and Zev Oman initially developed the concept and self-funded it (as it is currently) and Silber indicated that their initial gathering of listings was a challenge. “We first had people contacting brokers, overcoming their resistance to list with us, and after convincing them needing to manually populate the database with listings in order to make it easy for the brokers,” Silber said. “Now that we’ve reached a critical mass, 75% of our listings are entered and maintained by the brokers themselves.”

There are a number of other sites that list properties, such as the Minnesota Commercial Association of Realtors property exchange, mncar.org; the national LoopNet.com; CoStar.com; and the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development’s at mnpro.com, so competition is there (Silber indicated the top competitor is MNCAR which charges brokers a $250 initiation fee and ~$1,400 annually), but GoFishCommercial is 100% free for both the buyer and seller/broker (advertising is the primary revenue model with a $19 or $39 per month for broker premium services, e.g., adding more photos to listings and having them appear at the top in the search results).

In addition to the free aspect and a focus on fast, efficient searching for properties, there is the opportunity for property owners themselves to participate in listing their properties which can make smaller deals easier to do and lower the frustration levels for both property owners and those of us hunting for space. As a small business owner, I’ve sought commercial real estate several times in the past 22 years and experienced being too small to get attention from a broker along with the considerable time investment and an overall frustrating and poor experience.

Their goal is to quickly move in to key cities throughout the US and be the #1 site for commercial real estate. As one validator for their approach beyond the 600% traffic increase since June of 2007, the Minneapolis StarTribune is using the GoFishCommercial search engine in their commercial real estate section of StarTribune.com.

While revenue could undoubtedly be gained from adding feature-after-feature, their real opportunity is to rollout this proven model as quickly as they can nationwide, which is exactly what they plan to do.