On Wednesday, commercial real-estate brokerage Colliers International announced that Schmidt had re-joined their San Jose office as a SVP for R&D leasing and sales. He's hardly a stranger to the Colliers, having served from 1994 up until last year as president and a member of the board of directors of directors. Schmidt calls his brief sojourn to RealCentric, which linked property-owners with space-seeking tenants through an online platform, "a great experience."
"I learned a lot," he tells GlobeSt.com. "We were at the one-yard line. There was a tremendous investment in technology."But now technology is all that remains of RealCentric, which as recently as four months ago boasted that it would expand to 40 major U.S. metropolitan markets by the end of 2001. Like so many other real estate Web sites, it simply could not get the funding it needed to survive. The site is still active, but RealCentric is no longer providing services. In fact, Schmidt now wants to sell the technology that once made his site hum.
December sounded the death knell as RealCentric sought a final round of funding. Disheartened by a looming economic slowdown in the online sector, investors shook their heads. Layoffs ensued.
"So I would say by the end of December, everything went to that great dot-com place in the sky," Schmidt says. "Everything dried up…. We were a victim, like many other Internet-related companies that did not get their financing."
Some RealCentric services were paid subscription based, but Schmidt did not say if subscribers would be refunded their money. He also is not certain if the company is filing bankruptcy. No one at RealCentric could be reached for comment by press time on Wednesday.Schmidt says he sees other colleagues returning to their bricks-and-mortar former employers as a result of the dot-com shakeout, but doesn't see that as indicative of online real estate's failure.
"It's just a period of time before the consumer adoption rate increases for new technology," he says. "You don't change human behavior overnight, and I think a lot of people thought it was going to happen much quicker than it did. But the experiences that I had with RealCentric gave me even more strength … in my offerings to my customers."
And although Schmidt thinks the commercial real-estate industry may be slower than some to pick up on Internet-related offerings, he believes it will eventually happen.
"I think the commercial real-estate industry, by definition, is still a fragmented industry," he says. "But you're going to continue to see services by commercial real estate professionals being used and developed on the Internet."
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