Stanton Young, marketing manager of Sperry Commercial, is responsible for developing all graphics and marketing materials for the firm. This includes offering memorandums (OMs), flyers, advertisements, websites, full marketing packages and more. Since onboarding with Buildout a year ago, he’s been able to free up half of his workdays for other, more strategic tasks that had previously been sidelined.
When we talked with Stanton about his experience using Buildout, he told us he’s been designing materials for commercial real estate teams for 17 years, and Buildout has made his job easier and more enjoyable than ever before.
Stanton had been manually creating every marketing material from the ground up with graphic design software. With those programs, it could take as long as four days to complete an OM. He noticed brokers were getting frustrated with that process because they wanted complete marketing documents in their hands faster, and they wanted to be able to make materials themselves if Stanton was out of the office. With these pain points in mind, Stanton’s firm sought a new tool, and they discovered Buildout.
One OM used to take four days to create, but with Buildout, Stanton can create four OMs in a single day. Because Buildout serves as a centralized property database, all necessary property information is already in the program. When Stanton is ready to create an OM for one of his firm’s brokers, he simply has to click a button and the property’s data automatically populates into a custom-branded dynamic OM layout. Text is pre-formatted, and photos don’t require manual cropping and configuration, so editing that OM — or any other document created with Buildout — is simple and intuitive.
In the past, brokers sent PDFs of financials directly to Stanton. He then had to manually retype those numbers into professional document designs. Now, Buildout automatically populates financials into ready-to-use documents. Simplifying this process is one of the contributing factors to Stanton’s 400% increase in productivity.
Stanton also noted that before using Buildout, featuring maps in marketing documents meant individually creating and inputting multiple maps. Now, Buildout’s dynamically-populated maps are one of his favorite features because road, terrain, satellite or hybrid maps are instantly generated and added to materials.
Finally, Buildout automatically compresses PDFs to a size much smaller than he had been creating in his previous graphic design program. Because Stanton can now provide smaller file sizes of high-quality materials, agents can easily send marketing materials to their clients and potential buyers via email. Or, brokers can use Buildout’s share links to easily send documents without having to download and attach PDFs to messages.
Stanton has only received positive feedback from Sperry Commercial’s brokers because he can quickly fulfill every one of their requests. And if for some reason he’s ever away from the office, brokers can draft OMs and flyers and add documents to property websites on their own, preventing property marketing bottlenecks for the firm.
Sperry Commercial’s in-house brokers were initially apprehensive about using a new program, but now they appreciate the tool. Brokers in smaller satellite brokerage offices also love Buildout because even though they don’t have a marketing manager like Stanton on their team, they can still create sleek, professional marketing documents.
Stanton said he would absolutely recommend Buildout to other brokerages, especially those that don’t have a marketing manager in-house. Because many brokers don’t have time to create OMs and other materials themselves, Buildout is an easy tool that simplifies the process for them. Stanton recommends that every company — even those with internal marketing teams — takes a look at how Buildout can streamline processes and improve productivity.
Contact us to learn more about how Buildout can cut back on your day-to-day workload.
