LoopNet Raises $50 Million Through PIPE Deal

Calera Capital led a $50 million investment along with Trinity Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners into LoopNet. This was a PIPE (Private Investments in Public Equity) Deal that I believe was a good investment since I used LoopNet before and think during this downturn their revenues will increase.

Even on the consumer side, I'm pretty sure you'll see an increase in revenue for online apartment rental sites during this recession.

Useful Real Estate Sites: eRealInvestor & LoopNet

Came back from the Realcomm2008 conference last night. During my time there, I came across a pretty cool and useful new online real estate site called eRealInvestor. It happens that I met the Founder and CEO, Mike Genstil, on a ski trip with mutual friends a couple years ago.

Anyway, his company provides a good suite of analysis tool for residential and commercial real estate properties. There are 14 real-time financial metrics that you can adjust on sliders (i.e. cash flow, cap rate, gross rent multiplier). You can also conduct a side-by-side analysis of up to 3 properties. They are already integrated with LoopNet and The Wall Street Journal's real estate site.

If you don't already know about LoopNet, it's what I think is the best commercial real estate site out there if you're looking for properties to rent or buy. I used it when my old company was looking for office space. They have over 950,000 unique visitors per month, 2.75 million members, and over 595,000 listings.

@Realcomm in San Diego

So I'm with one of our companies, Hibox Technology, down in San Diego for a couple days. Realcomm is a conference at the "intersection of commercial real estate, corporate real estate and technology" (yeah, a mouthful). Should be fun and interesting.

Hibox Technology... Your Virtual Receptionist

One of our portfolio companies (sorry but the Lunsford Group doesn't have a working website), Hibox Technology has recently launched their product. It's a virtual receptionist technology that greets your guests in a cool fashion while saving your company money and human capital.



So this hardware and software based solution can increase your current receptionist's productivity or simply replace this position. With rent expected to double over the next two decades, space utilization and related costs become very important in the near future.

The core idea was inspired by Brandon Birtcher, CEO of Birtcher Development & Investments, which is a leading commercial real estate developer in Orange County. Birtcher and Lunsford Group have invested in Hibox Technology. If you're interested in this product, just email me at bernard[at]lunsfordgroup.com and I'll connect you with the Hibox team.

Foreclosures on Hotpads.com... Revealing

TechCrunch's post, "Foreclosures Shown On Scary, Encroaching Heat Maps," led me to Hotpads.com and to testdrive the site. It's very cool and has useful data on the U.S. housing market, and of course other information if you're looking to buy or rent.


So anything that's red or a shade of red it not good. My current home of Palo Alto is in a blue area and seems safe.


LA looks hot, in a bad way.


My hometown of Northbrook, IL and Chicago overall doesn't look too healthy either.


Other real estate sites to check out: Zillow and Trulia. We used both of these sites when we were house-hunting a couple years ago. I preferred Trulia's user-interface (UI), but Zillow seemed to have more useful information and tools.