The property report: On the Web: Start-up firm wants to put real-estate investor on line
[An occasional look at commercial real-estate ventures on the Internet]</br></br>A NEW Internet company called American Real Estate Exchange Inc. is making an ambitious promise to real-estate investors.</br></br>"Our goal is to make buying commercial real estate more like investing in the stock market, where all the information you need is reported in one place," through a site on the World Wide Web, says Thomas C. Lewis, senior vice president of the closely held Bethesda, Md., company. American Real Estate Exchange, or Amrex, plans to officially launch its site this summer, although portions are already accessible at http://www.amrex.com.</br></br>How will it work? Enter a zip code or a county and Amrex does "due diligence" on properties in the area. The Web site displays charts of trends in local demographics; property-tax assessment records; information on local construction; a history of recent sales of buildings in the area; a list of environmental risks; and summaries of relevant news stories about the area.</br></br>Most of that information, which Amrex licenses from a variety of other sources, won't be available until the summer. For now, the site consists primarily of an archive of abstracts of previously published real-estate and environmental news, organized by subject and location, as well as a directory of real-estate investment trusts and publicly traded companies heavily involved in real estate.