Commercial real estate (CRE) brokerages have a number of challenges in today’s industry landscape. Stubbornly elevated interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, ongoing inflation, and unpredictable policy shifts are real factors for CRE brokers across the country.
For brokerage firms large and small, boosting the speed of deals, cutting costs, and increasing efficiency remain a top priority, especially in such a competitive industry. A skyrocketing number of companies are choosing AI tools to streamline workflows and significantly cut down the number of hours spent on time-consuming tasks. But not all platforms and services are the same, and the most forward-looking tech that could make the biggest impact for brokers are the platforms that can do it all.
Demand for AI tools
The past few years have seen AI growing to be a transformative force across the commercial real estate industry. From office brokers to self-storage investors, AI tools have moved past the exploratory phase and are fast becoming the norm for brokerage companies, many of which are looking at incorporating AI into their operations for the long-term.
According to research from Morgan Stanley, AI has the potential to automate 37 percent of tasks in real estate, representing $34 billion in operating efficiencies. There are myriad ways AI helps industry professionals, including assisting brokers with property research and valuation, staffing buildings more efficiently, and using virtual assistants to show properties to potential renters and buyers, just to name a few.
For the commercial brokerage niche in particular, AI tools can automate and simplify the daily routine tasks that have long been the most time-consuming for brokers. By its nature, commercial real estate is a fast-paced, relationship-heavy industry where things can get messy easily, especially with data.
Companies and their clients often operate using fragmented systems, with data scattered across several different sources, spreadsheets, and third-party platforms. Often, brokerage professionals find themselves losing precious time by frequently reentering the same data and searching out information on email threads and spreadsheets.
This data fragmentation slows down the dealmaking process and can lead to costly errors. Across different divisions, such as leasing, property management, and accounting, firms very often use multiple, non-integrated tools, clouding any real-time view of assets.
Buildout’s game-changing technology
In the face of so many external challenges and competitive pressure, many industry professionals are turning to unified platforms tailored directly to the CRE sector that connect the very beginning of a deal to its close.
More than 50,000 brokers at some of the largest CRE firms in the country are using Buildout, a software platform built specifically for commercial real estate and powered by AI. Offering one login for users and one system, Buildout is the only fully integrated suite of products for CRE brokerage firms on the market, offering comprehensive services for prospecting, CRM, marketing, and back office tasks. Explore these capabilities in Buildout’s latest webinar.
Buildout’s key offerings include enabling users to find owner information for properties before they hit the market and data tools that ingest data and automatically parse out important details for necessary forms. At its core, Buildout is an AI forward firm that crafted its offerings to embed into a brokerage firm’s workflow to serve as a deal engine from start to finish, rather than perform as a peripheral AI tool.
Forward-looking offerings
“The platforms that win the next few years won’t be the ones that added AI features, they’ll be the ones that made AI fundamental to how their customers work,” said George Mountis, VP Product at Buildout. “AI native means intelligence is embedded in the product, not bolted on. Our customers shouldn’t have to find the AI—it should already be doing the work.”
Buildout recently released Buildout CRM, an all-in-one prospecting and CRM solution, and is eyeing new features for customers on the horizon, including Quickbooks integration, more drag and drop flexibility, and becoming an AI-native platform. The company’s flexible pricing structures, which are set at a per user per month basis, meets brokerages where they are and scales with them as they grow.
Companies that use Buildout praised how it is tailored for commercial real estate, how it makes it easier to work on deals as a team, and the ease and simplicity of the tech’s services. “I don’t have to have 40 tabs open any more. I only have three and they’re all Buildout,” said Jennekah Barnes, Director of Operations at Clemons Real Estate.
In the fast-paced CRE world, industry firms and professionals will continue to view AI platforms as a necessity rather than a luxury. As brokerages in the space fine-tune their vision of using AI in their businesses, choosing a system that connects each step of the deal cycle not only creates a streamlined and more efficient approach, it ensures they are one step ahead of the competition.
