New Products, Projects Headline NTCAR's Sell-Out Expo

DALLAS-There couldn’t have been a better spot to roll out a new software for Web Real Estate Inc. than yesterday’s North Texas Commercial Association of Realtors annual Expo. The Web Real Estate product, still in beta testing, has been solidified by a strategic pact with Garland, TX economic development entities.

The Garland Chamber of Commerce and Garland Economic Development Partnership will be the first public entities to have their commercial buildings on webrealestate.com, a vehicle originally designed just for asset managers, brokers and building owners. “This is actually a model,” Lee Thurburn, Web Real Estate CEO, tells GlobeSt.com. “I anticipate there will be several more Texas EDCs brought into the fold before the year’s out.”

Garland properties will be incorporated into the site within two weeks. Thurburn says it’s a natural evolution to go from brokerage houses’ listings to the public domain. “Our forte is to be the turnkey marketing solution for commercial properties,” he says.

In yet another change, Web Real Estate now has teams on the ground in Phoenix and Atlanta. In two weeks, Chicago and Detroit will be up and runnning.

The NTCAR function is one of the largest networking gatherings of the year for the association, attracting exhibitors from those same EDCs that Web Real Estate is targeting as well as ancillary services and brokerage houses. This year’s event, says Scott Byrne, NTCAR executive director, played to a full house with all 104 exhibitor spaces being sold out and well in excess of 1,000 attending the four-hour affair at the Hotel Inter-Continental in North Dallas. It’s the first time in years that all exhibition space reached the maximum, he says, noting the “tremendous energy” that emanated from the room as brokers and vendors plied their trades and showed off their wares, including developers’ up and coming projects.

Like so many other North Texas municipalities, the metroplex suburb of Graham set up shop to pique brokers’ interest in its projects. Graham, a Young County city of 9,005, will break ground in October on its first spec industrial building in a 27-acre business park. It’s just 30,000 sf and only the second building in the development, but Graham’s EDC was hopeful that a passing broker might have a willing client in the wings for the spec project or one of the handful of others that the community is backing.

Harwood Technologies, a division of Harwood International, got into the game, showing off its new software designed to be a high-tech portal for commercial buildings. The end product is individualized for each building and uniquely includes an e-mail “complaint” section, delivering a quick-fix to tenants who aren’t quite sure who to call when something breaks. Roland Garcia, Harwood’s account executive, says talks are under way with a high-profile Dallas-Ft. Worth building owner to hook up properties with the first Harwood high-tech product to come to market.