Internet can focus commercial real estate deals.

Buyers looking for commercial real estate face huge challenges of time and distance, and brokers serving them have a limited chance to show their properties in the best possible light.

Jet lag, conflicting appointments and limits to the capacity of even the most energetic visitor to view a string of commercial properties and maintain perspective present challenges that the real estate firm must overcome.

Particularly for global organizations, the ability of a visiting executive to spend more than a day to view prospective sites is coming under increasing pressure as corporate travel policies tighten.

You have one chance, and a limited amount of time, to make a good real estate decision. How are you ever going to be able to gain the local knowledge to winnow those sites and come up with the five or fewer which are actually worth traveling to look at?

Enter the Internet, which mates some old and some new technology to produce an array of efficient tools for commercial real estate use.

Savvy commercial real estate firms are flocking to the Internet and its World Wide Web because it allows them not just to put their portfolios on-line, but lets them offer a range and depth of information that pre-qualifies customers in distant locations.

It can be a much more vivid, multi-media experience for users who are accustomed to old-style brochures, listing copies or guidebooks. Even at its most ordinary level, Internet presence can include user-manipulable floor plans, utility details, pricing and market comparables.

When you add things like new VRML programming, a commercial real estate broker can give prospective clients a virtual walk-through of buildings on the market. The VRML technology literally gives you the feel of being in that property, with the ability to zoom in for details or zoom out for a wider perspective. Real estate browsers can look 'up' at the overhead and 'down' at the floor if they choose.

Best of all, while browsing customers may view this as a high-end offering which boosts your company image, for real estate brokers the Web presence is a major headache saver. It pre-qualifies customers and gets them past the initial phase of touring a series of buildings which may or may not meet their needs.

It also allows for a good customer-to-broker understanding early in the process of a real estate deal, because an ancillary area of the custom real estate web site can be a 'look and feel' area for your organization. Company history and background, a property portfolio, prestigious past deals and current broker biographies and photos can all be offered easily with the customer in the ideal no-pressure environment - their own office.

Using the linking capability of the Web, brokers can offer many of the assets of a region as well. Customers who may be concerned about quality-of-life issues can find built-in links to cultural, sports and restaurant attractions. On-line demographic information can also be made available.

The savings to commercial real estate companies are potentially enormous, because ali of this information is available on the customer's own time and with a minimum amount of disruption to the day's business. While a real estate organization has to maximize its effectiveness on local time, Internet presence is a 24-hour-a-day presentation.

Compared to other advertising media, the Internet provides a very focused tool. Unlike a newspaper, where only a small percentage of readers may be interested in your product, visitors to your Web site choose to come there. If the site is well-designed and well-promoted, those visitors have a high initial level of interest in your offering.

Costs of establishing such a presence can be surprisingly low. For a basic on-line Web presence, a company may be able to budget as little as $5,000 for the first year for service which includes site design, offsite hosting, connections to an Internet server, reporting on site traffic, and site promotion to relevant "search engines" used by customers to browse the Web.

More precision, such as involvement in a database search vehicle which would allow customers to search for properties based on highly-specific criteria, could raise that price to the $10,000 to $15,000 range. Costs for higher-level technology, such as VRML, which involves on-site photography and computer "stitching" to bring shots together into a virtual reality tour, may run significantly higher.

The best way get a grasp of the dynamic new real estate tool that the Internet provides is to locate a reputable Web site design and development firm to ease entry into this new and rapidly-developing medium. Such a firm can help avoid the perils of a random entry to the world of the Internet, and can help develop a Web strategy which provides both an effective presence and a group of tools to analyze and fine-tune that presence.

No matter how involved a Web presence may seem, it creates huge efficiencies for the commercial brokers who use it. Of course, people are still going to want to go look at real estate before they buy it - but that's where a real estate broker's core competence comes in.

And the difference between showing three to five pre-qualified sites to an interested customer who knows something about you, or showing 30 sites "cold" to an out--of-town visitor, is obvious.