Jay Soneff is done paying ransom.
“About five years ago, I received a call from the company that was handling our marketing and listing platform,” he said. “They told me they were raising my cost to over $600 a month. I was going to have to sign a three-year agreement that had some nasty penalties if you didn’t perform.
“And I really felt like it was extortion.”
The solution, Soneff decided, was to launch his own competitor to CoStar, LoopNet and Crexi, companies that offer real estate research, marketing and listing services.
Commercial Co-Op was born. In 2022, Soneff started testing it in Grand Junction. He expanded to Denver a year and a half ago.
Soneff — who runs Jamis Cos., a local commercial real estate brokerage, investment and management firm — said he’s spent $2 million building the company. And he said Commercial Co-Op can do anything his competition can do for less.
“Our site’s very agile, very adaptable and intuitive, and we have some new features coming out in the spring that will even make it more exciting,” he said.
Commercial Co-Op will list your property, help you market it, allows you to communicate with other sellers and listing agents, look at comparable sales and provides financial analysis tools for real estate for $150 a month.
LoopNet, one of the most popular listing and marketing service, costs users $1,100 monthly for all its bells and whistles, according to its website. The most basic plan starts at $153 per month and doesn’t offer much beyond listing and marketing brochure assistance. The plans don’t include the financial analysis and research tools found on CoStar, LoopNet’s parent company.
“One of the firms we met with told us that their (commercial real estate) tech cost was by far their biggest cost item, above their rent, above their complete facility costs. That’s how expensive it’s become,” Soneff said.
Soneff cofounded the company with fellow broker Amy Garris and longtime administrative assistant Marsha Laurienti. His daughter Jaclyn does marketing for the company. They also have a full-time salesperson, Isaiah Mayfield. Behind the scenes, there’s a small team of coders in Pakistan.
Commercial Co-Op has 700 users and 7,000 listings across the state. It’s performed well so far on the Western Slope, Soneff said, adding that the real estate community there is smaller, still uses fax machines to do deals and is “gun-shy” about paying for pricey tech offerings.
“We’re pretty entrenched up there,” Soneff said. “The plan is to just kind of come down the market, come down the mountain, Pitkin County, Garfield County, work its way to Denver, because it really works well for those communities that aren’t that connected.”
The next phase of growth is centered around the Denver metro, he said. So far, the company has found success in picking up the small one-person or two-people shops.
“Ideally, we’d like to partner with a couple of the midsize firms,” he said. “We’d like to partner with them to really help grow the company faster. It would also help us toward getting us to our goal of next spring, actually having our first (outside) funding.”
Soneff said he doesn’t know how his company manages to be so much cheaper than the competition.
“I really can’t answer the question,” he said. “Why are they charging so much?”
On the residential side, MLS website REcolorado charges agents $60 per month, he noted.
Commercial Co-Op’s website currently lists around 3,700 properties for sale and lease in Denver, including in Ballpark, where Soneff owns a handful of properties. He sits on the board of the neighborhood’s new General Improvement District, and said he plans to zero in on submarkets like it across the city to drive listings.
“We created the platform based on: ‘This doesn’t work on those other ones; let’s make it work.’ So ours is thought from a process of, how do we make an agent’s life easier, and how do we do it at a cost that they don’t cry about?” Laurienti said.
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