MyDealBook: Wisdom of the Commercial Real Estate Crowds

Written by Allen Stern - October 8, 2007

MyDealBook is a relatively new startup focusing on the commercial real estate market. Here is the description of the service from the welcome email, "MyDealBook is a free professional directory for real estate. You can post your profile, company and projects into a marketplace and interact with your local real estate community." Check out an interview with the CEO Mark Shacknies.

You setup a typical profile and join a company. I noticed that I can add myself to any company already listed - there should be a company supervisor to keep things "safe".

I am a bit confused using the service as there are "deals" and a "marketplace" - the marketplace is a google maps mashup of the deals - why not merge the two into the marketplace - sounds better than deals. There is a file upload which works very well and allows sharing with your rolodex (i.e. friends). Other features include RSS, real estate news, community tumblr, and a job board. The site has a Web 2.0 feel to it and seems well crafted in terms of the technology build.

MyDealBook is using Ruby and Amazon for the backend and what appears to be offshore help for the labor. The service is free and is ad-supported. They appear to have a number of builders as advertisers currently. I could see this service working well inside of a larger real estate platform.

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COMMENTS - Add New Comment

Submitted by Mark Schacknies on October 8, 2007 - 4:08pm.

Allen,

Thanks for covering us. I just wanted to clarify some notes:

1. Deals. "Deals" are essentially industry jargon for "projects". So everyone can add their projects/deals to showcase their portfolio experience. This is like building an online resume for yourself. As new members come, they can "join" the projects that they worked on with you. This builds a collective marketplace full of rich associations of "who built it".

2. The difference between Marketplace and Deals tab is that Marketplace is a central repository of all public deals whereas Deals tab is your own private collaboration room for team members to post files (up to 100 MB) and messages. For example, in marketplace you can do research on an entire city. But in Deals tab I can collaborate with my architect and engineer with some private documents.

3. Offshoring. We actually developed MyDealBook locally in Washington DC. But we did outsource some design work to Denver.

Thanks very much for your article. Please let me know if anyone has any comments. You can reach me below:

Mark Schacknies
--
www.mydealbook.com/markschacknies