Net service helping small business think big

Small businesses often have a difficult time navigating the complex world of commercial real estate.

Small deals mean small fees, so small business owners often find it hard to get the expert help they need and frequently must go-it-alone to find space for their business.

Colleen Sheridan, a 20 year veteran of the commercial real estate industry, saw this need for reliable information for small business owners as an opportunity. She founded theSmallTenant.com, the on-line bulletin board and information center that provide small business owners with a selection of available spaces together with a leasing guide which offers tips and negotiating strategies used by the most experienced players in the industry.

Brokers and owners with available small spaces to lease can showcase their property on the site for a nominal fee of $10 a month for searching tenants to find.

When she launched her site last January, Sheridan said brokers and owners were skeptical about the Internet as a marketing tool for commercial real estate. But while newspaper classified ads and direct mail are the traditional marketing methods for large blocks of space, Sheridan said they're not practical if you only have 500 s/f to lease. She said her concept for an affordable solution to marketing small units of space prompted her to leave her job, back the company herself and along with her daughter Kerri-Anne Sheridan, an experienced web developer, and spend a year building the platform that would work.

One year later and the site has 200 properties in five states and gets over 150,000 hits a month. "Now, we need to convince more owners and brokers that this is the best place to market their available small spaces," she said. "We get far more tenants searching for space than we have properties posted. We're ready to host 100,000 properties on the site with national coverage."

Sheridan added, "I believe we have created a win-win situation for everyone. Frequently, when we speak to people about our service, they wish we were in business when they were looking for space. I hear a lot of nightmare stories about how difficult the process was.Hopefully we are making at least one aspect about running a small business just a little bit easier."