[Note: To follow is an excerpt of a radio show interview conducted by Peter L. Mosca, host of Income Property Investment Talk dot com, with Richard Juge, CCIM, 2010 President of the Institute, and President of RE/MAX Commercial Brokers, Inc. in Metairie, Louisiana and broker/owner of a RE/MAX office in Mandeville, Louisiana. Richard discusses how the CCIM's education, networking, and technology services and products, or what he calls "the power tools," serve as an invaluable resource to the commercial real estate owner, investor, and end user. To listen to the show archive or download an MP3, go to www.IncomePropertyInvestmentTalk.com/010610.]

Mosca: What do you see coming up in the year 2010 as it relates to commercial real estate investing and the economy?

Juge: We do a survey of our members through our investment trans-quarterly report with Real Estate Research Corporation. There's an interesting chart in there that shows that for the first time in many years our members, our own CCIM members, are saying, "This is the time to buy." We track buy recommendations, hold recommendations, and sale recommendations, so we're at a very unique point in the market where our members, I think some of the more educated in the business, are saying that this is the time to buy. You never know when you're at the top, and you never know when you're at the bottom, but we see 2010 as the recovery year. It's not going to be robust; these are published statements on the economy, but clearly we see 2010 as the recovery year and with more activity but dollar volumes or the average prices being down, but the activity being up.

Mosca: Let's move over to the Institute itself. In the unlikely event that people listening to us right now don't know about the Institute, the designation itself, can you give us a brief intro into the products and services that not only serve the member, but also the owner, the investor, and the end user?

Juge: The CCIM Institute is a 40-year-old plus organization. It started with a bunch guys on the West coast that were primarily investment-focused, and it expanded into the commercial arena. I got started in the business in '88 and when I got into it, people said that when you know what you need to know in this business, the first thing everybody around here pointed me to was, "Go take some CCIM classes." So clearly, 20 years ago that's what it was known as, and today we're unveiling in 2010 our completely rewritten education. It's updated in all facets and is truly state-of-the-art education, and that's most people's entry into CCIM -- our core courses. There's four of them, that people take to get the designation at the end, and in the end the students have to put together a portfolio, or resume of qualifying experience, meaning that they're in the business. It's not just brokers; in fact, less than half of us our brokers now – there are appraisers, bankers, and individual investors. That's our roots, and since then of course as we grew into a membership organization and a designation organization, the members started to certainly gain a lot of power within our organization. They say, "Hey, I've got my designation. Now what?" So we strive to provide a whole host of member benefits, technology benefits to networking opportunities and a whole gambit of services. We do it well, if not better, than any other organization out there. There are four core courses and most take two courses a year. There is a comprehensive exam and a comprehensive review leading up to that exam at the end so call it five courses. There's over 20 some odd universities that participate in our University alliance and we share our information back and forth with them, and they will tell you that it's comparable and certainly more practitioner based, than what you would get in a Master's degree, but the Master's degree maybe more in depth in terms of classroom hours.

Mosca: As the most coveted industry designation, one where multi-nationals only work with CCIMs when they need commercial real estate advice and support, does this put a lot of pressure on you and your leadership team to maintain that status?

Juge: It does. We teach, and we'll enter our eleventh and possibly twelfth place to actually go overseas to do our classes and instruct this year. We have designees in over 35 different countries. We're making large in roads internationally and it's a challenge to be there, but we have chapters now set up in China and others that are putting in for the affiliation that you're talking about Peter. Clearly, globalization is not stopping; it's going to continue to gain momentum in our opinion, so that's an important and vital part of that.

Mosca: Can you share some other key findings that you found in your last ITQ report?

Juge: I started in 1988 New Orleans, which, combined with tax collapse and oil collapse, this place was worse than the worst markets are now. People were going to auctions or buying property at that time and others were literally saying, "Those people are nuts, buying this stuff." Those people made tons of money in this last market cycle. This is the time, we think as an Institute, and personally I happen to echo these comments, that this is the time to buy. Even foreign investment was happening here 20 years ago, and we would look at these outside investors like they know nothing, what were they doing, but yet these people made tons of money. The overall psyche of this place was in the doldrums.

Mosca: You have exciting news coming in March. You also have something currently that's been a part of the CCIM Institute for several years now, The Site To Do Business. Can you please explain?

Juge: CCIM REDEX. Can we extend the show two hours, because that's about as long as I can go on about them both, but first let me start with The Site To Do Business. This is primarily a geo-spatial, GIS site where we take demographic data, crime data, basically any type of data that's out there and we can geo-code it, map it, and put together impressive reports. By the way, this is a free member benefit for a CCIM designee or candidate. By the way anybody can sign up to be a candidate. Go to our website, CCIM.com and just say, "Hey, I want to be a candidate," in the search box. In fact, right now when maybe transactions aren't occurring or weren't occurring like they were, the ability for our own members to get in there, run a full demographic analysis report, and there's even a report in there called the Retail Marketplace Profile which in our 102 course is our Market Analysis Course, we spend four days getting to a gap analysis saying, what's the buying power versus the supply in some area. This report will run it for you on any property, so if you're sitting there with a vacant strip center right now saying "Gosh, I wonder who would be a good tenant to go in there," this report, which is a very expensive report, we pay for all of our members to use for free. It takes seconds to generate. Our members together said, "Hey, from a retail, office, industrial, self-storage type capacity, what are the reports we need?" We combine these packaged reports and maps, and it really does a great job for anybody.

Mosca: That's what I was referring to earlier. While all these benefits help your members, in the long run they're helping the investors who are listening to us today as well.

Juge: Absolutely, especially now. Mistakes were especially made in '06, '07, early '08, meaning when the irrational exuberance in commercial real estate was occurring and people were buying or building without looking at true supply and demand factors or without the hallmark of CCIM looking at the financial analysis to say, "If I invest x dollars, what's my return not just in appreciation but in cash flows over time?"

Mosca: Let's turn our attention to CCIM REDEX. What is REDEX?

Juge: This is a project that is at least three to four years in the making. CCIM has spent and will spend over $2 million getting this thing to the point that it's up and running. REDEX stands for Real Estate Data Exchange. This is again primarily geared as a member benefit for all designees and candidates. It won't cost them anything as long as they are a dues-paying member. The idea here, Peter, is if you look at the residential world, it has tended to be ahead of the commercial world in terms of technology in data exchanging. In commercial real estate, we have not have that luxury. I would say the commercial real estate market is very inefficient. The practitioners' productivity is key, and being more productive than the guy next to you and in this economy where the analogy of "freshman orientation, look to your left, look to your right," because one of the three of you probably isn't going to be in business, come however many months from now, is true. It's more competitive and it's tougher to get deals, and what we want to do is provide the most competitive advantage for our members. It's simply this: we want to have one place for somebody to go type in the listing. For example, if they get 123 Main Street listed, we want them to have the ability to put it in and then push and pull this data to various sources, and at the top of the list is what we call the National Listing Services. So envision a day when we don't have to duplicate data or put that data in multiple sites, by doing it once it saves me and my staff time, and my agents, hours and hours of our brainpower. It's ridiculous that we don't have a commercial standard. We're about to unveil this product on March 31st and we have gotten the vendors that we have agreements with to push and pull data back and forth with us. Within a sphere of many of the major players, we are going to have an open standards exchange in commercial real estate for the first time and it's going to start, essentially, the second quarter of this year. We don't want to compete with other products and services because they all do a good job. If we compete with them, they're not going to expect or allow this data to go back and forth, meaning we're not trying to get into what their business models are because they do a good job of it. The vendors like it because it makes getting data into their products easier.

Mosca: Obviously there's a lot of excitement here and the enormity or vastness of this project is why it took so long to get to market. You can't just snap your fingers and get this kind of thing done. If you tried to do it that way, it doesn't work, so I applaud you guys for taking the time and getting it done the correct way. I'm sure your members will respond accordingly. Are you now going to start offering education through online technologies?

Juge: Yes. In fact, let me back up and say as the REDEX product launches, there's going to be The Site To Do Business tools and features on it, and on The Site To Do Business there'll be listing data or property data information that can be purposed back on it. That's a neat tie-in. Our education in general is going to have more integration with our technology products. For instance our market analysis course is going to have The Site To Do Business type demographics integrated into it, which is something that we've needing to do for a long, long time. As we move this year, we will unveil a series of online courses. I don't care if you sell copy machines or shoes for a living; you need to go take the one-on-one financial analysis course. This is a fantastic course and we will give the availability of it online.

Mosca: We talked about education. We talked about technology. What about networking?

Juge: Last year we had a push from what we call: "Wall Street to Main Street." What we've discovered is that there are a lot of organizations that do a good job at national level marketing. Instead of trying to compete with them, we're going to work with them, and bring people together.

Mosca: I'm still an old school guy when it comes to print. Your CRE Magazine, in my opinion, is worth the membership dues that you pay. Can you talk a little bit about that magazine and whether or not you agree with me?

Juge: I totally agree. I'm just like you. I enjoy the hard copy publication that comes out every other month from our Institute. By the way, a lot of content comes from our members, but there's a lot of outside people who also contribute. Actually, the title of the magazine is Commercial Investment Real Estate Magazine, http://ciremagazine.com, and it features great insight in terms of market trends and feature columns and stories. In fact it's an award-winning magazine year after year, just a great, great site, and a great public resource, by the way.

Mosca: What's your golden nugget for today?

Juge: We started out questioning whether I'm overly optimistic, and to a fault I am Peter, but I firmly, firmly, firmly believe this is the turn around year for brokers. Take heed. We're predicting more deals, not bigger deals necessarily, but more deals.

Published: February 4, 2010

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Peter L. Mosca is president and founder of BAK Communications, Inc. He has over 22 years of communications and media consulting experience, serving a variety of nonprofit organizations, including the CCIM Institute and the REALTOR Association on all three levels – national, state and local. He is the Spokesperson Trainer for the CCIM's Jay Levine Academy and trains hundreds of residential REALTORS nationwide to be effective industry spokespeople. He is consistently ranked as "excellent" by about 90% of those who attend his presentations. While his principal consulting focuses are public speaking and media relations development and content delivery and management, Peter is also the host of the Voice America Network's weekly radio program, "Income Property Investment Talk," a one-hour program that brings the powerhouses of commercial and residential real estate to property investors every Wednesday at 11 a.m. EST. Peter is married 17 years to his wife Barbara. They have two children: Ashley, 15 and Kelli, 12. Hence, the name BAK Communications, Inc.