Taming the Wild Kingdom (of Real Estate Dot-coms)

PikeNet's Taxonomy... How do you make sense of real estate dot-com land? That's the question that Eileen Circo, Bob Potter and I posed to ourselves last week when we spent a full day refining our classification of web-based real estate services. Hey, it's difficult for us, and we spend full-time tracking the evolution of real estate dot-coms. It's impossible for practicing developers, managers and brokers to keep up.

Currently, the PikeNet Directory contains 3,652 commercial real estate web sites. While the majority of these sites are facades for brick-and-mortar businesses, many of them will come to resemble web services as the line disappears between business and e-business. But there are hundreds -- maybe 500 hundred or more -- current web services aimed directly at commercial real estate professionals and/or their clients. So let's narrow the field further to just the 200 real estate dot-coms that we expect at the Expo. How do you make sense of all this?

Here's our answer -- the PikeNet Guide, a taxonomy of web-based real estate services, that we're planning to distribute to attendees at the Expo. We'll look at sites aimed at the real estate life cycle. We'll examine sites aimed at specific types of real estate. And finally, we'll consider which sites focus on information versus service. We want you to leave the Expo with a clear sense of direction and good background for making real estate decisions about how to allocate time and resources.

PikeNet Expo... Check out United's discounted airfares. You can fly into JFK, LaGuadia or Newark. Sample: Chicago-LaGuardia, midweek roundtrip - $253. Call 800-521-4041 and refer to Meeting ID Code: 592OQ (that's "oh," not "zero"). PikeNet Expo, New York Hilton, Oct 23-24, 2000. Register online.

--Peter Pike