For nearly a century, Binswanger has built its reputation on deep industrial real estate expertise and long-standing client relationships. Behind the scenes, though, its marketing operation ran on disjointed, manual workflows that turned every listing into a multi-hour project. Discover how Buildout helped the Philadelphia-based firm modernize its marketing, double its listing volume, and support a growing broker team without adding support staff.
Buildout has allowed us to scale and double our listings without any additional effort.
Before Buildout, Binswanger's marketing team did everything by hand. Flyers were designed from scratch, website listings were built and updated manually, listings were uploaded to platforms like CoStar and Crexi one at a time, and email campaigns were built separately. Every step lived in its own system.
"Our biggest frustrations were the fact that everything was disjointed, that only the marketing department could work on anything, and there was no tracking," explains Chris Opdyke, Director of Marketing & Technology at Binswanger. "If I wanted to find stats for anything we did, I might have to go into ten different systems to do that."
That friction showed up in time. "When we did a typical listing in the old days, it might take 5 or 6 hours because we had to jump through all these different systems to create everything," Chris says. As Binswanger's broker team and listing count grew, keeping up meant one of two things: hiring more support staff, or finding a better way to work.
Binswanger competes in a market with firms significantly larger than itself, so leadership gave the team a clear mandate: use technology to become more effective and more efficient.
"Technology was important because we were growing and we had to scale up without hiring more and more people," Chris says. "That was a way to solve that problem and to increase the amount of properties and deals we could do every year."
Buildout stood out because it brought flyer creation, website listings, and email marketing into a single platform. Instead of jumping between systems, the team could build and publish an entire listing from one place, and brokers could share it directly with clients.
"You have the custom flyers, the custom emails. You're able to make a website that you can use the link, and your brokers can use that, give it to their clients," says Gretchen Clay, Graphic Designer at Binswanger. "It's honestly a great platform to have everything you need without having to do everything custom on your own."
Standardizing didn't mean sacrificing the brand. Gretchen worked with Buildout to turn one of her own past designs into a flyer template, so every listing carries Binswanger's look. "As a graphic designer at Binswanger, I think it was important to have our branding in each flyer that we have," she says. "It's been really impactful to generate that many flyers in a template that we really like."
"The biggest impact in numbers is the fact that we've gone from six hours to about one hour," Chris says, an 80% decrease in time spent on every listing. Since 2019, Binswanger has doubled its listing volume while operating with 33% less administrative headcount, even as its broker team has continued to grow.
The time saved has gone back into higher-value work. With listings no longer consuming the marketing team's days, Binswanger has expanded property marketing across more channels, invested in its brand, and helped brokers develop custom pitches that win new business.
"The biggest benefit of how our team operates today, thanks to Buildout, is the fact that we can do these projects so quickly, now we can focus on other marketing tasks that we need to do throughout the company, branding, etc.," Chris says. "Buildout has allowed us to modernize our business while supporting our long-term growth."
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