Woods says the concept was inspired by "the lack of transparency" in the commercial real estate process. "Technology is not used to its fullest advantage in much of commercial real estate, when it comes to finding and keeping clients, managing projects and professionally networking with one another," he says.

Woods has more than 13 years of marketing, sales and real estate experience. A former leasing and sales associate--at CapStar Commercial Realty in Rockville, MD--Woods worked with both owners/investors and lessees/buyers. He also sold residential real estate at Keller Williams Realty Consultants in Silver Spring, MD.

[IMGCAP(1)]Rogers has 11 years experience in the real estate industry, working in tenant representation, portfolio management, financial analysis, and project management in more than 25 states and multiple countries--including China, India and Singapore. His past clients include AOL/Time Warner, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Goldman Sachs, Anteon, General Dynamics and the George Washington University.

They plan to launch locally, but gradually expand nationally. Woods says, "We determined early on that promoting ourselves nationally would be difficult for an extremely small staff, and expensive, too. We needed a strategy to grow that we could handle from both the staffing and financial standpoints. So we're launching in the DC/Baltimore area.

He continues, "we already have pre-sign-ups around the country--and with some of the tools we'll be providing--we'll grow organically. But we really wanted to go local with our launch, to give us the best bang for our buck, marketing-wise. This means initially we won't have any real travel, any shows/expos to pay for, any extravagant advertising, and so on. We'll be able to meet people, shake their hands and educate them about Sibdu in person. We really think this is important as we start out."Sibdu plans to provide:

• Local market information, gathered from news feeds found within localized sub-sites
• Member-generated blogs.
• Social networking, to help CRE pros build referral/business networks, and share news within your market
• Market-specific supplier directories and job board
• An interactive calendar to plan events and distribute them to your social networking groups and local markets
• And access to property transaction-related platforms that will let users search commercial listings and display those listings with tools like video streaming, as well as broadcast requests for space.