In our ongoing series of Startup profiles, we interviewed Brian Randy Funk, President of RealUp, a Raleigh based commercial real-estate listing website. 1) What is your 30 second elevator pitch? Brian Randy Funk:  RealUp.com is the revolutionary commercial real estate listing website offering free recent sales comps, free memberships, and free search.  Our services set us apart from the competition and offer guaranteed results to our members.  We are committed to connecting owners, brokers and investors with thousands of up-to-date industry listings, profiles, trends and data.  2) Describe the planning leading up to your launch? Brian Randy Funk:  We recently launched our beta site on May 17^th at the ICSC RECon, a worldwide commercial real estate convention specializing in retail real estate.  One of our most successful strategies involved securing large partnerships before the launch.  We've signed some big names like Sperry Van Ness, TCN Worldwide and Divaris Real Estate.  We have a few more partnerships in the works, so keep an eye out for some even bigger names. Our marketing strategy has been heavy on social networking and speaking directly with commercial brokers to find out what they need in a commercial property listing site.  We have advertised in National Real Estate Investor Magazine and Commercial Investment Real Estate Magazine. We are also doing a large online advertising campaign with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. 3) What market need do you fill? Brian Randy Funk:  Commercial real estate is on a long road to recovery from the recession.  The industry needs a low-cost alternative to the over-priced listing services.  Brokers need a place where they can list properties and see results without the high price tag.  The other listing sites have steadily raised prices for listing properties and charge to search the listings.  We will never charge for searching, because we want the listings to be seen by as many people as possible. Recent sales comparables are expensive but valuable information to commercial real estate professionals which is why we have heavily invested in acquiring the comps to provide to commercial real estate professional for free.  The recent sales comps are updated continually to provide up-to-date and accurate comparables.  Memberships to RealUp are free, so there is no cost associated with acquiring the data.  We also offer free demographics with the listings which is another very valuable data set for commercial brokers. 4) What is your and your team’s background? Brian Randy Funk:  RealUp.com, LLC is a subsidiary of TerraServer.com, the leader in online imagery for satellite and aerial images.  TerraServer gives us over 10 years of experience with large data sets and running a global website. 5) How are you funded and what is your revenue model? Brian Randy Funk:  We are privately funded by TerraServer, so we are on secure financial ground.  During our Beta period, everything on RealUp is completely free.  In a few months, we will institute our pay-per-results pricing model that is very similar to the Google AdWords model, and we will release more details on our customizable pricing options in the later stages of the beta period.  The site is banner ad supported as well, and we offer other unique lead and advertising opportunities. 6) What is the importance of being based in NC? Brian Randy Funk:  North Carolina is a great place to live and work. With several great universities nearby and RTP right down the street there is a lot of technology talent to draw from.