MINNEAPOLIS—"Commercial real estate has operated in the same way for decades, and what we have decided to do is focus on the small tenant, which is a very large, underserved group." That's Jim Simpson, CEO of Crelow, a technology platform geared toward connecting office tenants and owners with available space to meet their requirements. Launched this past November in Minneapolis, Crelow has also been rolled out in Denver, Phoenix, Houston and Seattle, with the Bay Area up next. The platform will continue rolling out nationally throughout 2016.

Simpson makes it clear that Crelow is not a listings website, nor does it eliminate the commercial brokerages from the equation. In fact, Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE and Transwestern all have used the platform, along with smaller brokerages.

"What Crelow is, is a demand-driven marketplace for office space," he tells GlobeSt.com. "It's not listings; you don't go to Crelow and list your property. Other examples of a demand-driven marketplace are AirBnB and Uber, where it takes two sides of the marketplace to be successful."

By demand-driven, Simpson means that "we take the tenant, which is the person that drives the entire business, and they put their requirements into the marketplace. As we say, it's not about listings; it's about listening."

Pat Hagen, Crelow's COO and the company's cofounder alongside Simpson, points out the smaller tenants comprise the vast majority in the office sector. "They make up about 80% of all office lease transactions; about 80% of office tenants are under the 5,000-square-foot threshold," he tells GlobeSt.com.

Accordingly, Simpson says, "What we did was to create a unique way for tenants and tenant reps to make their needs known to the market. Rather than going through reams of data which may or may not be reliable, they put their requirements out there. We make it really easy for landlords and landlord reps to learn about those requirements and respond to them."

On the Crelow platform's front-end app, "the tenant or the rep goes through our software and specifies the requirements," explains Simpson. "We post that to a public deal board for free, including all the specific amenities"—up to 75 in all to choose from.

For their part, landlords and landlord reps can designate their territory on the site. "We then notify those landlords and reps immediately when a tenant bid request has been posted on the deal board," Simpson says. "We notify them specifically by email as those come in. They then respond with a custom bid for that tenant or tenant rep. There's no charge for this service whatsoever. If the tenant likes what they see, we then introduce the two parties.

"It's kind of like Match.com and Priceline for office space," he continues. "What we want to do is get these two parties to a really high-quality first date"—that is, a tour of the space, on which both tenant and owner can benefit from the clarity on what the tenant is looking for.

Although Crelow's primary focus is on small tenants, Simpson says larger ones, up to 50,000 square feet, have also used it to their advantage. "They're discovering spaces they wouldn't have been able to discover any other way. We're seeing tenants of all types using it at this point."