RALEIGH, NC—Todd Marovich is spending a lot of time around Raleigh these days. With the Xceligent July 15 target date for launch here, there’s still lots to do. As senior VP of corporate development for the GlobeSt.com Thought Leader,  Marovich is charged with ensuring all the bases—driving the town for updated data content, hiring, selecting an advisory board—have been touched.

Fortunately, he’s had some help. “The association in Raleigh is called the Triangle Commercial Association of Realtors,” he explains. “They had a database system called Tacquire, which we basically took over and are converting to our system.”

The changeover is not unlike Xceligent’s exclusive agreement with CCIM, news of which GlobeSt.com broke during the recent RECon convention in Las Vegas. In both cases, the firm is taking over the data management and returning a broader, deeper and more accurate analytical tool kit.

In a press statement made at the signing of the agreement, Tacquire president Kathy Gigac described the deal as providing its membership, and for the matter, local brokers in general, “a cost-effective tool with national reach to market listings, as well as identifying suitable properties for their clients.” The system is also designed to provide a complete inventory of commercial assets; information on active lease and sale listings; a tenant roster matched to each property; multiple years of sales comp history; and quarterly certified market reports.

“Over the past two months our team has driven the Raleigh market, and this has helped us increase the listing count considerably,” the two-year Xceligent veteran reports. The association had “about 3000 listings and we added another 3500. We essentially doubled the listing count.” The drive also allowed the team to verify existing information, in all, essentially hiking breadth, depth and accuracy of the data.

Staffing up is also a key part of the to-do list for Marovich, who for 15 years ran commercial real estate national accounts for CoreLogic prior to signing up with Xceligent. “We’ll have 16 people, four local to the Raleigh/Durham area” with the rest based in the firm’s Independence, MO, corporate office. 

Plus, he’s currently screening the local advisory board, a team the firm builds in every market to verify deals and data. The team is culled from a list of peer-nominated top producers in the local market, both national and local firms.  He reports he currently has some 30 nominated office brokers and 20 each from industrial and retail.

Despite the ready-made user base provided by the local association, there’s room for great growth in market share for the firm. Marovich estimates that the group represents a rough third of all local area brokers, providing a large field yet to sow, to tell and sell the Xceligent story and, he says frankly, to dispel some misconceptions.

“Not until we meet with them do they fully understand the depth of what we do and separate fact from fiction,” he admits. “The perception is that we’re a low-cost alternative and so the data must be of a lesser quality. In fact, when compared side-by side, they see the truth that our data is actually superior, current, deep and accurate.” It’s a story, he says, that is getting out. “It’s a matter of educating the marketplace.”

Once Raleigh is launched, Marovich, who previously launched Atlanta for the firm, will push on to continue the national rollout, including additional Carolina markets. And he’ll repeat the process again, gathering and enhancing local-market data, hiring, building advisories for local verification and telling the Xceligent story all over again.

“Post-recession, brokers have a new understanding of what it takes to get deals done,” he says. “That’s the essential reason why our national rollout is so critically timed. Our data is an important part of that new understanding.”