Fast Lane Ventures, the Moscow-based serial startup developer, has launched an online service called Kommerstate.ru to help commercial real estate market players lease, purchase and sell properties.
Started last week, the site is the first of its kind in Russia, according to Fast Lane, and is more than a property database: it “converts a user interested in a property into a real business lead.”
The service got its inspiration from the French sites Webimm.com and Agorabiz.com, noted Kommerstate’s Yuliya Lanskova in an exchange with East-West Digital News – although those sites do not go as far in monetizing lead generation.
Only professional brokers and agents can publish properties. The website provides them with a list of appropriate tenants and buyers as well as with several tools to manage promotion campaigns through the site. Having chosen a suitable property, the tenant or buyer then has the opportunity to call or email the broker directly. Kommerstate.ru charges the broker a modest fee to build this list of potential clients.
Kommerstate.ru has employed a team of specialists to look through all the properties submitted and remove those which are not renewed by the broker.
In Fast Lane’s estimation, there are currently “a large number of unoccupied high quality office spaces, both in central and regional cities. In Q1 2012, this figure approached 2.2 million square meters in Moscow alone.”
By addressing this market all over Russia and neighboring countries, Kommerstate.ru expects to attract some 6 million users by 2015.
Fast Lane declined to comment on the cost of the project and on whether or not it was its sole backer.
