Commercial real estate is different from residential real estate in so many ways, starting with finding it! Residential real estate has local MLS, Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, residential real estate company websites, and plenty of social media posts, pictures, and video.

Commercial real estate has always been a bit more elusive. Investors either relied on their network/word of mouth, commercial agent, or driving neighborhoods and knocking on doors. Commercial agents who didn’t have properties that met their investors’ criteria also relied on their network/word of mouth, driving neighborhoods and knocking on doors.

With the advent of the internet and rise of social media, real estate investors have become more efficient in their search for property and millennials are driving the demand for more information and data. As a result, there is a lot of money being spent on gathering commercial property data and developing new, on-line methods of marketing, some of which can be very expensive.

MIAMI Commercial, the commercial division of MIAMI Realtors, saw the need to provide both agents and the public with a transparent way of searching for commercial and investment property and, in September 2019, launched The South Florida Commercial MLS.

This platform takes all properties, excluding residential which are already on public platforms, that are listed in MIAMI Realtors MLS and allows the public to search for free, without registering or providing any contact information. It is intuitive and the searching public can choose to search in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, a variety of currencies, or in square feet or square meters.

The numbers relating to the public site for November are as follows:

• 4,064 listings
• 3,039 users
• 2,068 new users
• 25,087 page views

Argentina, Venezuela and China were the top four countries outside of the U.S that searched the site and the top three U.S. States outside of Florida were California, Texas, and North Carolina.

Searching for commercial property in South Florida? Your search just got a bit easier.