GlobeSt.com Fills Market Gap By Serving Real Estate Industry.

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Having built a customer base with business-to-business trade magazines covering the real estate industry, it seemed logical for Real Estate Media to launch an online real estate news site. But launching the site last June when the market for Web ventures was horrible seemed like a questionable move.

Real Estate Media's executives said not so. A downturn in the economy meant an upswing in information demands for commercial real estate industry players who were hungry for data that could supply them with valuable leads.

The company saw the need for online real estate information was ripe and decided to strike while the iron was hot, even if the market was freezing cold.

"We are content people," publisher Jonathan Schein told EIR. "That's what we do best. We saw that there was a void in the market. The local markets were not being covered and no one was focusing solely on commercial real estate."

Leveraging the well-known brand name it had made for itself in print, Realty Media launch GlobeSt.com in June 2000.

GlobeSt.com's strategy was to target the U.S.'s 25 largest metropolitan cities and regions. The company hired a corps of freelancers in each city to cover the local commercial real estate market and divided the site in 25 city-specific sub-sites.

GlobeSt.com generates the majority of its traffic through its e-mail alert service. Users can register at any of the 25 sites to receive daily e-mails of industry-specific news headlines.

By clicking on the headlines they are taken to the full story, which is located on the GlobeSt.com site. GlobeSt.com currently has 50,000 users registered for its e-mail service, a significant increase from the 3,000 registrants it had when it launched in June 2000.

The site currently generates the majority of its revenues through advertising. As one of the only companies exclusively covering commercial real estate, GlobeSt.com has the opportunity to attract new online advertisers.

But with the volatility of the online advertising market, the company's executive team knows that selling ads isn't enough to make the site a profitable venture. GlobeSt.com is augmenting its business model by using content syndication as a prime revenue driver.

In November, GlobeSt.com partnered with online commercial real estate community MortgageRamp. GlobeSt.com will provide the site with its original content. GlobeSt.com has entered into similar partnerships with Realtormag.com and LoopNet.

Real Estate Media is owned by U.S. Equity Partners, L.P., a private equity investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein Perella & Co. The company publishes several trade magazines including Real Estate Forum, Real Estate Southern California, Real Estate Chicago and Real Estate New York. r

Contact Info: 212-929-6900 or www.globest.com