VIRGINIA BEACH, VA: Divaris Real Estate, Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of several new retail and office properties to its leased and managed portfolio. With these additions, DRE currently manages and/or leases in excess of 20 million square feet of prime office, retail, and industrial space throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states.

Retail properties include:

Winter Haven Mall, at U.S. Highway 17 & Avenue K, SW in Winter Haven, Florida, is a 278,258 square foot enclosed regional shopping center anchored by Burdines.

Carrolltown Center, at 6400 Ridge Road in Eldersburg, Maryland, is a 333,450 square foot, enclosed community shopping center anchored by Kmart, Peebles Department Store, Rite-Aid, Super Fresh, and a six-screen R/C Theatres cinema complex.

Midway Plaza, at 5700 North University Boulevard, in Tamarac, Florida is a 220,000 square foot shopping center anchored by Publix. Other tenants include: Blockbuster Video, Sally's Beauty Supply and Hair Cuttery.

Midlothian Crossing Shopping Center, at 8535 Midlothian Turnpike in Richmond, Virginia. This is an 87,000 square foot shopping center anchored by Unfinished Furniture Mart.

Buena Vista Shopping Center, at Buena Vista Road in Columbus, Georgia is a 49,000 square foot shopping center which includes such tenants as Big Lots and CVS Pharmacy.

Kendall 117, at 11700 North Kendall Drive in Miami, Florida is a 31,000 square foot shopping center with such tenants as Pearl Vision and several smaller, exclusive shops.

Office properties include:

Towers, Perrin Building, at 1434 Crossways Boulevard, in the Greenbrier section of Chesapeake, Virginia, is a new 104,000 square foot office building developed by Armada/Hoffler and occupied by Towers, Perrin, Forster and Crosby, a benefits administration company for Fortune 500 companies. With more than 78 offices in 71 cities worldwide, Towers Perrin, headquartered in Philadelphia, is one of the world's largest management and human resources consulting firms. The company helps organizations improve performance and manage their investment in people, advising them on human resource strategy and management, organizational effectiveness, compensation, benefits and communication.

Westlake Office Building, at 310 Technology Parkway in Norcross, Georgia is a 61,658 square foot office building occupied by Pediatric Services of America, the nation's leading pediatric home healthcare provider.
 
 

Divaris Establishes a Mortgage Brokerage in Miami

 Miami, FL: The majority of Divaris' clients are financial institutions and major property owning companies, so it became increasingly clear that because of Divaris' close relationships with these clients, they were uniquely positioned to provide financing for a multitude of real estate needs. Initially, Divaris Mortgage opened as an "in-house" brokerage service for its clients. However, in June, 1999, the company decided to begin accepting outside commercial brokerage assignments. 

Based in Divaris Real Estate's Miami, Florida office, Divaris Mortgage Brokerage, LLC utilizes unique and consistent methods to make the process of obtaining financing as efficient and as affordable as possible, while focusing on customer service and satisfaction. The key to this process is working closely with clients who are focused on resolving their financing needs. Under the direction of Eric Massey, the unit combines dedication, personalized service and professionalism to develop congruent client/broker relationships. 

Divaris Mortgage Brokerage LLC offers a wide range of services, including: conduit loans, bridge capital, mezzanine financing, turnaround capital, acquisition finance, credit tenant loans, construction/construction-to-permanent and refinancing. 

Cyberlocation, Cyberlocation, Cyberlocation... Commercial Real Estate Brokers use LoopNet to List Properties

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA: Imagine trying to accomplish your daily business without the use of a telephone. It was only a few years ago when fax machines came on the scene to make sharing information immediate for the asking. Prior to that, overnight mail was the best you could be expected to do. Now it seems that information needs to be disseminated before it is even requested! 

The youngest person working in your office today could probably not conceive of business on a day-to-day basis without Fed X-ing and faxing. Tomorrow's young professional will feel the same way about the Internet. 

Even commercial real estate has found an ironic new location -- in the ethereal realm of cyberspace. Traditional bricks-and-mortar brokerage firms have found a way to harness the speed at which information can be shared at the end of this century. To do that, commercial real estate professionals have turned to a website called LoopNet. 

LoopNet, Inc. was founded in 1995, and is now the Internet's largest commercial real estate listing service. It represents over 80,000 professionals including the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR), 35 Commercial Associations of REALTORS and 25 state CCIM chapters. The philosophy behind LoopNet was to develop a critical mass of property listings that would result in maximum exposure for each property. Consequently, 85 percent of the commercial real estate organizations in North America market their properties exclusively with LoopNet. 

Unlike the residential real estate market, the commercial market has no national multiple listing service (MLS) or organization that maintains a nationally centralized listing service. Annual commercial real estate brokerage commissions total $10-$12 billion and mortgage loan transactions are valued at $200 billion annually. 

Internet offerings in the commercial real estate market have focused primarily on providing information to real estate brokers, rather than in using the Internet as a platform to enable commercial real estate transactions. LoopNet, from its inception, took the approach that the Internet would lead to a fundamental transformation of commercial real estate transactions. As a result of its early market lead and focused strategy, LoopNet is ideally positioned to be the online commercial real estate leader. 

LoopNet's site is free to post properties and is also free to search the database by multiple parameters, including property type, location, square footage, and price. The site boasts over 8 million properties viewed, over $13 billion in properties for sale, and over 270 million square feet in properties for lease. Over 146,000 users spend an average of 22 minutes browsing the site at any given time. 

"The concept of publicly identifying or listing one's information on properties that may be under the control of the broker is not necessarily something new. It has existed in various forms over the past two decades through various Multiple Listing Service channels. However, these channels were controlled by the organizations that published them, such as the local Boards of Realtors, or a company that might operate a listing service in the trade area, or through real estate networks that might have a direct means of communicating between their members," according to Gerald S. Divaris, chairman/ceo of Divaris Real Estate. 

"The real difference is that these were not open to the public, but only to the industry, with the result that there was a guarded use of this vehicle by brokers who essentially wanted to protect their listings so as to have better control against their competitors," Divaris said. 

"The Internet, on the other hand, is a public arena and as such, it is not only accessible to people within the industry, but also to the public at large. What this meant was that the brokerage community and property owners had to make a decision. 'Do I advertise my product, recognizing that it will be viewed by my competitors and customers alike, or do I keep it under cover and accept the real and perceived loss of business through lack of exposure,'" Divaris explained. 

The original format was for companies to post their individual listings in a cryptic form, on their individual web sites, in an effort to elicit an inquiry from the customer or from the brokerage community. However, information presented in cryptic form, loses impact and is limited in its potential delivery of the message. 

This resulted in a number of companies creating Multiple Listing Services on the web which allowed the public to view listings and for brokers/owners to post their listings for view by the public. 

Dennis DeAndre founded LoopNet, after a successful career in the commercial real estate industry. DeAndre is a graduate of the Walter A. Haas School of Business of the University of California at Berkeley, with an emphasis in real estate and finance. His first-hand experience with Arroyo & Coates, initially as an analyst specializing in institutional grade multi-family and commercial properties, and then as a broker specializing in the acquisition and disposition of multi-family and commercial properties nationally, gives him a deep understanding of the issues facing commercial real estate professionals. 

DeAndre was convinced that one of the main obstacles for the commercial real estate industry was the absence of a national property listing service where properties could receive maximum exposure. As a broker himself, he knew that property exposure was the key to selling and yet exposure on a broad scale was not easily achieved. DeAndre began meeting with the heads of commercial real estate organizations and formulated plans to develop a property listing service that would easily enable agents and brokers to market their properties to the widest audience possible. Since then, the LoopNet property listing service has become the Internet's largest and the de facto industry standard. 

DeAndre's vision went beyond creating a property listing service to developing Internet-based services that enable commercial real estate professionals to transact business on a daily business. Because of his deep roots in the industry, DeAndre knows the leaders throughout the commercial real estate market, enabling LoopNet to quickly develop partnerships and to provide services that these professionals need. 

As a result of this evolution, the process of marketing one's listings has dramatically changed. Divaris Real Estate was one of the early participants in LoopNet, having signed up in 1997. Companies like DRE have found that this process has greatly enhanced their ability to expose their listings to the market with the result that the selling time has been reduced and their properties can be better presented, resulting in inquiries generated through utilizing this vehicle. 

Far from LoopNet or any other similar vehicle being a threat to the industry, this has become an important tool to promote a company's listings, services and to enhance its communications with its potential customers. The advantages include instantaneous information, improved updating, support information including data, maps, demographics, photographs, etc. The listings also offer aerial and ground photos, site plans, floor plans, financial summaries, demographic reports and 3-D virtual tours are all available at the click of a mouse button. 

"LoopNet has allowed us to post our listings in an international forum that is flexible enough to be immediately and constantly updated. Their network is also a valuable medium for increasing traffic to our website, which gets our corporate message to potential customers instantly," said Dona L. Hall, director of marketing for Divaris Real Estate. 

LoopNet uses a feature they call "LoopLink" to seamlessly integrate the LoopNet Property Listing Service into broker and agent web sites, saving these professionals from spending resources on costly database development. The company banner appears on each property listing page and agents and brokers can use the control center to maintain their listings and to track exposure rates. 

"The link between LoopNet and Divaris Real Estate's web page further enhances the ability of the company to present its skills and profile. Every month that goes by, there are a greater and greater number of people who have viewed our listings. With constant improvements being made to the process, the more the public will use it and the better the process will be able to perform its job," said Divaris. 

A recent addition to LoopNet's services is LoopLeads, a free Internet search service that matches the criteria of those seeking to purchase or lease commercial properties with available properties. The seeker will receive automatically, via email, property listings that match their specific search criteria. Brokers can establish up to seven different parameters based on property type, minimum and maximum price, and city, county and state. 

"We will continue to expand the services we provide to commercial real estate professionals," according to LoopNet's vice president of marketing, Gina Clark. "We have an advisory board made up of representatives from key organizations who help us determine our priorities. We ask organizations for input on new services. We have a very customer-centric focus at LoopNet and a deep understanding of the needs of the commercial real estate professional." 

"Our products are developed internally by a fine engineering team. We believe that our utilitarian approach to making the site easy to use and understand has made it a successful site for the industry," Clark said. 

Contact management software, digital photography, database marketing, desktop publishing, and property management Intranets are all weapons in the commercial real estate professional's current arsenal. Through partnerships like LoopNet, the future of commercial real estate promises to take advantage of technological advances to increase speed, efficiency, and mobility of information like never before. 

Divaris Opens New Consulting Group

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA: A new operating unit has been formed by Divaris Real Estate, known as Divaris Consulting to provide specialized service to clients. Based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Divaris Consulting will provide a wide range of consulting services to municipalities private/public institutions, state and federal agencies and private companies in all areas of economic development. In addition, the new unit will assist corporations requiring development, relocation and expansion strategic planning services and advice.

Divaris Consulting will offer a broad economic outlook and in-depth analysis of economic development programs to clients in the Southeastern United States. Some of the services involve the regional and local economic development programs and include: analysis of competitive factors, such as labor, land, infrastructure, quality of life, financing and regulatory climate; strategic planning for economic development; community consensus building; business retention and expansion strategies; and industrial and commercial business development strategies.

Additional services of Divaris Consulting include the development of programs for marketing and leasing, tourism development, urban enterprise zones, business improvement districts, and organizational development for nonprofit corporations.

In addition to city and county municipalities, Divaris Consulting emphasizes regional and local corporate support within rural and urban localities. Some services offered to companies are: relocation and/or expansion planning, development and evaluation of Request for Proposals for site selection, land development and facility reuse strategies, market studies, evaluations of public/private partnerships, and project monitoring.

These services will enhance a company's understanding of the economic development climate in their particular locality, and will assist in the development of professional relationships between the company and its city or county municipality.

Judy Begland has been appointed vice president of Divaris Consulting. She joins Divaris Consulting with an extensive background in Economic Development. She previously held the position of director of development with the Virginia Peninsula Economic Development Council. She served as Assistant Director of the Department of Development for the City of Norfolk, Virginia and Director of Development for Isle of Wight County, Virginia. Currently Judy serves on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Economic Developer's Association. Judy received her Masters Degree in Economics from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

According to Judy, "Divaris Consulting is a comprehensive service delivery system for our clients emphasizing the significance of a broad overview of this vitally important area, as well as the competitive factors involved in developing industrial and commercial business properties."

This additional unit within to the Divaris Group will benefit not only commercial real estate professionals, but it will guarantee companies moving into the Southeast region a wide range of services involving both urban and rural planning and development. In addition, companies will gain a sense of retail revitalization, facility reuse options and land development strategies.

Divaris Real Estate Honored By Two National Publications

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA: Divaris Real Estate was ranked 26th in Shopping Center World magazine's list of the nation's Top 50 Managers of Strip Centers, published in August,1998. The survey was based on gross leasable area figures reported by the individual companies. The figures reflect centers that were open and operating as of April 30, 1998. The study excluded enclosed malls and centers with enclosed areas that comprise more than one-third of the total gross leasable area.

Divaris Real Estate was the only commercial real estate company that made the Top 50 that is headquartered anywhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In a similar issue, Divaris Real Estate, whose home office is located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, was ranked 95th top shopping center management and leasing company in the nation. This list was published in the March, 1998 edition of Shopping Center World.

Also recently, Chain Store Age, in its May 1998 pubication, reported that Divaris Real Estate was the fourth fastest growing third party property management company in the nation. Ranked after PREIT-Rubin, who held the number one spot in the nation, Divaris Real Estate's increase of approximately 4,400,000 square feet in 1997 is the result of its east coast expansion from Pennsylvania to Florida.

Divaris Real Estate currently manages and/or leases in excess of 19 million square feet of commercial space. There are ten DRE offices with two new offices planned to be opened during the second half of 1998.