When the lights went out last week at Kansas City, Mo.-based commercial real estate listing and research company Xceligent Inc., the darkness spread to Greater Des Moines, where the company was the first to provide such services when it arrived in the area in 2002.

So sudden and unexpected was the company’s shuttering and bankruptcy filing that an agent with Iowa Realty Commercial was online updating information when the Xceligent website crashed. A vendor helped the company patch together PDFs of listings with bare-bones information, said Kevin Crowley, who heads the Iowa Realty Commercial operation.

That was Dec. 14. Since then, a former Xceligent official has said company founder Doug Curry was looking for investors to join him in buying the company’s assets from the bankruptcy estate, with plans to have a website up and running by Thursday.

Continue reading for more on the fallout from Xceligent’s abrupt closure. Full Notebook story