New Dirt Finds New Way to Help Brokers and Retailers Make a Connection
Jul 21, 2011 12:13 PM, By Elaine Misonzhnik, Retail Traffic Associate Editor
It started out as most online dating sites do—as a way to help prospective partners both widen their pool of options and weed those options down to the few best matches. In fact, Dave Cattell, president and CEO of New Dirt, an online site submittal tool for commercial real estate brokers and space users, references the online dating site Match.com as inspiring him to bring to life an idea he has carried since his days as a corporate real estate executive.
New Dirt launched earlier this summer, but its founders hope that within the commercial real estate industry it will follow the same trajectory as Match.com did among the singles crowd. The dating site grew to approximately 20 million members in the 16 years since its launch.
“What I think will happen is that it will become the preferred tool for brokers and developers to use,” Cattell says. From a broker’s point of view, “with one click of a mouse, you can send a site to a large number of potential users that have strong matches. This is not about clogging up people’s email [boxes] with just more email. It’s meant to reduce the email.”
The idea is relatively simple, yet Cattell claims that the site is the first of its kind in the industry. In order to get the land sites they are marketing in front of the largest possible audience of end users, commercial brokers and developers can subscribe to a New Dirt membership for $400 a year. After a background check determines that the broker or developer has appropriate industry accreditation (no amateurs are allowed on the site), they can upload their properties into its database.
On the other end of the screen are corporate real estate executives with retail, restaurant and lodging brands. After putting in their site requirements into the New Dirt system, they get back a number of matches, ranked on a five-star system of compatibility, with zero implying no matching criteria and five being the closest possible match.
Because there are much fewer retail and restaurant brands looking for properties than brokers marketing sites, real estate executives with those companies can use the service free of charge. Much like an online dating site, New Dirt also promises to protect the executives’ privacy by sending matching sites to their New Dirt accounts rather than to their email. No direct email contact or in-person meetings take place until the end-user expresses a preference for such communication.
How it came about
Back in the days when he was in charge of real estate and construction at Kentucky Fried Chicken in the 1980s and early 1990s, Cattell remembers getting back from business trips every other week to find a huge stack of site proposals on his desk. Most of those proposals were for sites that KFC would never consider going into, yet he looked through all of them hoping to find the ones that fit the chain’s needs. The process wasted time and resources on both his side and the brokers’, Cattell notes.
“I would ask myself ‘Why are they sending these? And I guessed that they didn’t look at our site criteria.”
Ever since, Cattell thought it would be great to have an automated system that would allow brokers to access multiple brands’ real estate requirements and help them target their marketing efforts toward those that were most likely to result in a sale. When in 1995 he left KFC, however, the Internet was still in its nascent form and there was no way to effectively put that idea to use.
Cattell’s chance came in 2009, when he left Ruth’s Chris Steak House and partnered with colleague Michael J. Harrison. By that time, technology had moved light years ahead and brokers could access the Internet from anywhere in the world with their smart phones. What’s more, with so many firms laying off experienced real estate executives, Cattell believed the industry would eventually have to find a way to make up for the loss of human capital. Cattell and Harrison started development work on New Dirt in the fall of 2009.
“People said ‘Gee, this is the worst time in 50 years for [real estate] development’ and I said ‘It’s the perfect time,’” he recalls. “There is blood in the street. As we come out if this, there will be new approaches to doing business. There will need to be new systems for the human resources that got lost. And so we really created New Dirt to be a productivity tool for brokers, developers and end-users.”
Growth on the horizon
Cattell, who is currently promoting the tool among both commercial real estate professionals and corporate real estate executives, hopes that by the end of the year New Dirt will have signed up tens of thousands broker members and at least 50 retail, restaurant and lodging brands. Eventually, he would like to grow the number of brands to 300.
Today, New Dirt already counts Chick-Fil-A, Restaurants Partners Inc. and Golden Corral among its restaurant clients. But a larger database of brands will help draw greater interest among brokers and developers.
The site “is functional today and we have business being done today, but we are concentrating on bringing in more and more brands, which will bring lots of brokers,” Cattell says. “Brokers are hungry for a tool like that.”
In fact, New Dirt plans to have something akin to an unveiling at the Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) Institute’s annual conference in Phoenix, Ariz. this fall. While there, New Dirt will be one of the presenters during the Vendor Runway, on Oct. 13.
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