The truth of listing offices available for sublease in Sacramento law firms is that some listings are popular – and others are not. Some of our listing parties have great results and others do not.  So, from a discovery perspective I am putting a question out there that I would appreciate answers to:  What is the value of a Sacramento law office space listing?

The good news is that our listings are currently free in all markets (except Manhattan).  There is no risk today to try our service…but I am setting my thoughts out for the day in the future when we do have enough traction in Sacramento to justify charging for office space listings on a true value added basis.

We provide search engine optimized office space listings for Sacramento law firms with extra office space that seek to rent offices to other attorneys.  We take great pains to see that those office space listings can be found by other Attorneys who are looking for law office space in Sacramento on Google, Bing, and the other major online search engines that display office space listings.  But we can only “bring the horse to water”.  We can’t make him or her drink.  We can put your office space listing in front of Lawyers and other professionals who are looking for space in Sacramento – but we can’t make them call you.

From an advertising standpoint, you have to be “in the game”, to have a chance to win.  You have to be advertising your office space, to have the opportunity to rent it.  And you have to accept the fact that sometimes there are plenty of other lawyers that want to share what you have…and at other times there are not a lot of attorneys looking for what you have to offer.  This is the simple market truth.  But, if your office space listing is not available and in front of the marketplace…you have no chance to rent it.

We provide a sharply focused audience to expose your Sacramento law office space listing to.  There is only one thing our readers are looking for – they seek either to rent space within a  Sacramento law firm or law suite, or they seek a medium to promote their available Sacramento office space to other attorneys.  That is all we do.

Here’s our problem in a nutshell.  Some of these Sacramento law offices look great and are well located in good buildings – while others are not.  Some of these offices are properly or even aggressively priced – and others are not. Accordingly, there is some diversity in the experience of Sacramento law firms listing office space available for sublease to other lawyers and small law firms, on our website.

We have law firms who have advertised for months and not gotten a lot of calls.  We also (thankfully) have many lawyers that have advertised for a few months and subleased office space to parties that came to them through our website.  We even have a few that had success almost immediately upon placing their ad.  Our overall observation is that we generally don’t produce an overwhelming number of calls – but the calls that do come from our website are more often than not from very interested parties – because the professional law office space listing we provided has offered a good preview of the Sacramento office space you seek to share with another attorney or small law firm through your listing, and our audience is focused on looking for space.

At issue is the fact that we don’t really control the quality and attractiveness of the product shown on our website.  We only control the presentation and the factors that make your office space listing optimized to be found on the major search engines.  And since our objective is to treat each customer with the same high level of service and care, and each listing equally, we find it somewhat discouraging that occasionally we are told that a listing “did not perform”.  We tend to take it personally – but the real analysis of the situation in most of these cases that it wasn’t our performance but it was the overall attractiveness of the listing itself and the fact that something was being offered that nobody [at that point in time] actually wanted to see.

In the typical “classified” advertising model there is no traffic metric an advertiser can take into account. But the basic premise of our business was that we wanted ONLY to provide a value added service. And, if we did not do so for a particular Sacramento sublessor, we didn’t want money from that advertiser. OK, so that is noble (and our true intention). Now, how do we translate that into the business model for office space listings in the Sacramento law office space sublet market?

We are working on implementing a “counter” for each listing that will show how many times your listing was opened during each billing period, and how many times the user requested to view the contact information for the listing.  Perhaps the cost of the listing per month should be based on the performance level of the individual listings…and below a certain level there should be no charge at all.  This would push our pricing model towards Google, and might be more familiar and comfortable to some of our advertisers.
More on this subject soon.

A second pitfall we face as providers of Sacramento office space listings is that often our advertisers will receive a call from the listing on LookingForSpace.com, and have no idea that the call originated as a result of their listing on our website.  We could easily solve this problem by forcing readers to register before they see address and contact information, but a basic precept of our business model was that “the information wants to be free”, and a forced registration would violate that model.

So, in addition to being curious about your responses to the question: “What is the value of a law office space listing in Sacramento”, I would also be curious to hear your ideas on how we can keep advertisers informed about the performance of their listing when we our website initiated a contact, but the phone call is the only evidence, and the phone call contains no evidence of origin?

We are leaving the comments section open below, and we hope that in expressing your view you will help us build a better business model to serve the Sacramento legal community members who seek to rent extra law office space to other Attorneys – and who seek to sublease from a law firm or law suite and share space with other lawyers.

Regards,

Neal Lerner

LookingForspace.com-Pres.
(877) 918-3636