Category: General

OpenComps at 8! Happy Anniversary.

Post author By Svetlin
Post date May 5, 2014

Happy Cinco de Mayo! And Happy 8th anniversary to OpenComps! On May 5, 2006, OpenComps officially launched after over a year of development. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 8 years since then.

Of course, our first 6.5 years were mostly spent in sort of prototype state and real work on the service started in earnest only 1.5 years ago, but that heavily discounts the countless hours we put in maintaining a good data (especially in the hotel sector), maintaining 99.9% uptime and keeping the bugs away for those first 6.5 years.

We are very excited of the progress we have made over the past 1+ year and we really appreciate the support we have received from all of our users. Special thanks to all of our PRO subscribers who keep the lights on and ensure that the next 8 years will be even more epic than the first. We hope you join us for the journey!

Tags anniversary

General Updates

NEW: Export, Keyboard shortcuts, Local Amount/Currency and Thousands Separator

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

Besides large new features – such as Listings and Trends & Charts – the last few months have brought a steady stream of other system improvements. We have just been a little quiet about them. However, they have significantly increased our efficiency in updating or working with the database as well as brought along exciting new functionality. Here, we will focus on four new features which we find the most interesting.

Tags new feature, tutorial

General Updates

PRO Feature Review: MyOC

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

An often overlooked feature of OpenComps is MyOC – the ability to create custom set(s) of transactions so you can look at their aggregate statistics, export them en masse or map them together. This functionality is available only to PRO subscribers. Let’s us take a closer look.

Tags features, tutorial

General Updates

Feature Review: Trends & Charts

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 24, 2014

While we touched on this new feature in our 2013 year-end review, let’s take a more in-depth look at Trends & Charts.

Tags features, tutorial

General Updates

NEW: Listings on OpenComps

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 12, 2014

Since we are done with the wrap up for 2013 (here and here), we want to start charting the future of OpenComps for 2014. We have a few ideas on where we want to take our service next. We really hope you’ll like them and continue to follow us on this journey. We are always open to new ideas, so don’t be shy to get in touch.

As we mentioned in our introduction of the Tools section, we have always been about more than just following completed transactions. We really want to be the technological platform for cracking the institutional real estate marketplace open, transparent and functioning fluidly. So, in addition to helping people assess a market by searching for comps, we also want to help them with finding out what’s For Sale or who is Seeking Debt or Seeking Equity. All in our trademark no-fuss OpenComps style – blazing fast search, intuitive controls, “nothing but the meat,” instant statistics and customized data sets.

Today, we would like to officially introduce our new service: Listings. OpenComps PRO subscribers can post unlimited For Sale, Seeking Debt or Seeking Equity listings on OpenComps, while registered OpenComps users – for free – can view and search them. Just hit the “+ Add New” button and select your listing type.

Tags hotel, listings, office, residential, retail

General

2013 Top U.S. Brokers

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 10, 2014

Continuing with the 2013 wrap up, let’s take a look at the year’s most active sell-side brokerage firms. As we pointed out in our year-end review, last year was a super active year. That means there were plenty of happy faces at the nation’s top brokerage firms.

Tags 2013, hotel, office, residential, retail, statistics, top brokers

General

2013: Year In Review (and Introducing Trends & Charts)

Post author By Svetlin
Post date February 7, 2014

When we set about to write the 2013 review and compile the data – as any good writer – we reviewed our 2012 post. And we realized we were probably going to finish our 2013 piece with the same wish: “to bring our subscribers a more visual and immediate way to better understand the trends that are occurring in OpenComps’ dataset.” And we didn’t want to make the same promise twice. So we stopped writing reviews and started writing code!

Today – together with our 2013 review – we are proud to announce the new Trends & Charts section (see here for hotel, office, retail or multifamily). Currently, you can find it in our Browse By section (dropdown) together with the other data aggregation screens. And we are making it open for every one, reserving for our PRO Subscribers the advanced features such as filtering, longer time period (20 years) and advanced chart tools such as data zoom and save to PNG. This charting tool combined with its extensive search filter can produce really outstanding data insights. We hope you will consider unlocking it’s full potential with a PRO subscription.

And now onto our 2013 review. The chart that follows gives you a quick overview.

Tags 2013, hotel, office, residential, retail, review, stati

General Updates

Introducing Tools

Post author By Svetlin
Post date November 6, 2013

At OpenComps, in addition to recording transactions, we would like to provide you with the tools to close transactions or understand them better. Introducing our new Tools section!

In this new section, we offer templates for underwriting transactions (DCF valuation, project IRR), building or presenting cash flows, evaluating development projects, analyzing competitive sets, understanding performance-driven management agreements, and other transaction-related, professional tools and documents. We launched with a few tools but we plan to continuously update this section with more tools, so check it regularly.

Tags new feature, tools, update

General Updates

OpenComps on your phone and tablet

Post author By Svetlin
Post date October 10, 2013

We are very excited about our new design. How about you? But we are not only excited about how (good) we look now on the desktop. The even bigger news is that we are now optimized to look great on your phone or tablet too! Have you tried us out?

There is no new address to remember; no server redirection based on device detected (just go to opencomps.com). Thanks to our new front-end framework, we were able to create a responsive design that adapts to whatever device you are using.

Tags 2013, bootstrap, makeover, redesign, update

General Updates

We have a new look!

Post author By Svetlin
Post date October 3, 2013

Home Page

Just as fall is getting started to do a makeover to the trees outside, we are ready with our site makeover too. We worked hard on it all summer and, dare we say, we are very happy with the results. But the final judges will be you, our users…. so we would love to hear your thoughts!

Just to be clear, our makeover is just like a new suit… we may look different, but our simplicity in functionality is still there as you (hopefully, just as much as we) like it. The pockets, buttons and sleeves are still in the same place on the suit, just like our functionality is still there where you can see it and access it conveniently and expediently.

Tags 2013, bootstrap, makeover, redesign, update