Apto Commercial Real Estate Blog

When it comes to building software for commercial real estate brokers, you have to consider what you’re up against.

Commercial real estate is notoriously lagging when it comes to technology adoption. Excel, email, and maybe an old contact management system are still king. And they're king because they work (albeit in a 1998 kind of way). This makes the challenge of building something brokers want to use all the more difficult. If you’ve been successful in making money with these older systems, why change?

Don’t get me wrong—some brokers have changed. There are those who have adopted a more modern CRM as their primary technology platform. The problem, though, is that many CRMs are still limited to basic data organization and management. Those are important benefits, but they’re not actual activities that drive sales.

In other words, you don’t “organize and manage” your way to new deals; you win deals. And you win them through action, not management.

If you’re finding success as a commercial real estate broker, then chances are you’re winning and executing business based on a fairly repeatable process that demonstrates your unique value. That process is likely a series of things to do in order to create and keep momentum and assign responsibility to yourself or your team.

Apto’s latest feature set is designed to help you do everything related to a deal much more efficiently. It lets brokers track, manage, and execute deals from start to finish with a simple interface and intuitive workflow that drives everything forward.

How, you might ask? Well, we have three feature spotlights to show you our favorite tools and how they’ll help you close more deals faster.

Have you taken a look at Apto Deals yet? Our latest feature is meant to give you perfect clarity and workflow for every deal.

With a million details and moving pieces to manage, it’s shockingly easy to have something fall through the cracks. Many of the brokers we talk to have just such a story, and frankly, they get emotional about it (and who could blame them?).

Closing a deal and cashing a commission check is such a good feeling, right? After months—sometimes years—of hard work, all your efforts finally pay off.

If closing a deal is good news, the even better news is that you can easily keep up the momentum and use your recent success to drum up new business. Just think, you have relevant market intel that you can use with other owners in the market. Maybe they’re in a similar position to the deal you just closed.

Leavitt Digital, or LDCRE, is a commercial real estate listing distribution platform, syndicating listings to 900+ news websites around the world. Those websites cover 27 countries, all 50 U.S. states, and 7,100 global cities.

And it now integrates directly with Apto, meaning your listings get way more exposure with no effort on your end.

Consider these two aphorisms: location, location, location and a picture is worth a thousand words. In the world of commercial real estate, the latter communicates the former. It accomplishes this through the time-tested technology―a map.

Fortunately for you, Apto Prospect & Nurture now features an all new mapping tool to help you get more out of your property, listing, and comp data.

Let’s think about the deal lifecycle for a moment.

From the first time you talk to a new prospect to when that check gets cashed, there are dozens of moving parts. And dozens of apps and tools to help with each of those parts.

Well, that number just went down a bit. Apto and Buildout are integrated to make the move from pitch to marketing that much smoother and simpler.

Let’s think about the marketing workflow for a moment.

After months of building a relationship with a new contact, you sign an exclusive rep agreement. You’ve done your homework on the property, capturing details and photos diligently in Apto. Now you can convert that property to a listing and hit the ground running. You need to get the word out to your network, comb through your database for potential tenants, send emails and make calls.

Well, now instead of entering the same property details time and time again across different listing sites, you can dramatically broaden your reach with the click of a button.

A broker I know recently told me that, since adopting a new technology, “cold calls” have become “familiar calls.” That’s because as he churns through his daily prospecting calls, he has details about the contact on the screen in front of him so he can make a quick connection.

Here’s the story he told me:

“I recently called a landlord with a big business park out by the airport. In Prospect & Nurture, I saw right away on the map that there was construction for a distribution center nearby. I was able to reference that right away when we got on the call and ask how it was affecting his tenants. Just knowing what’s going on in the area makes it so much easier to make a connection with a stranger.”

Like many kids growing up in a bucolic yet blue-collar part of the Midwest, I had to exercise my imagination when it came to more glamorous landscapes that featured mountains, oceans, or skyscrapers. Thankfully I had Chicago and its architecture to inspire me and ground my thinking about place.

That imagination turned to vision as I devoured movies and TV shows about places like Beverly Hills, Miami, and New York. The more I saw on the screen, the more I felt I understood, the more I felt some version of those cities’ realities.