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Dot-com Refugee Still Sees Potential for Online Real Estate

SAN JOSE-After a spin at failed business-to-business site RealCentric, Dave Schmidt is back at his former bricks-and-mortar employer Colliers International. But that doesn't mean he's not still a believer in the online ideal.

By Allison Landa | Updated on February 07, 2001

SAN JOSE-After a spin at failed business-to-Dave Schmidt can never say he didn’t have his dot-com experience. As VP of business development and East Coast regional director for a Los Gatos, CA-based online business-to-business commercial real estate services firm, RealCentric, Schmidt experienced the Internet world firsthand. But late last year, the RealCentric foundered decided it was time to return to his bricks-and-mortar roots.

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.

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