Coldwell Banker Commercial has a national name, 120 years of history, and 190 firms across the country. Its marketing didn't always look that way, though. With every office building materials in its own way, CBC showed up to pitches as a collection of individuals instead of one brand, and that cost it business. Discover how Buildout gave CBC one consistent voice across every market, cut marketing work from days to minutes, and gave brokers back their most valuable commodity.
Since we've worked with Buildout, we're giving our network and our brokers back the most valuable commodity that exists — and that's time.
Before Buildout, marketing across CBC's network was, in Matt Kornfeind's words, "a bit of the Wild West." Brokers relied on PowerPoint templates, outdated Adobe software, and a hodgepodge of third-party resources. Every office did it differently. When Matt rolled out a brand template, he'd hear back "I only do PowerPoint" or "I need Photoshop 7."
That inconsistency did more than hurt the brand's image. It cost CBC real business.
"We have a broker in Florida, he was working with a national client," explains Matt, Vice President of Growth & Innovation at Coldwell Banker Commercial. "He brought in another one of our professionals from Pennsylvania to showcase that here's the reach of our network, and we could work together collectively."
The pitch didn't land the way they hoped. "When they sat down in front of the client and they put together the different presentations and their processes and how they showed up, the client unfortunately ended up coming back to our broker and saying, you might say you're a national firm, but what your pieces are putting out there says you are not."
"We didn't show up collectively as one," Matt says. "We showed up as a lot of individuals who are independent of each other."
"Seeing all of these different marketing packages and how people operated, we knew we needed to streamline the process," Matt says.
CBC needed a platform built for commercial real estate that brokers and marketing teams of any skill level could use. It also needed to deliver a consistent brand without flattening every listing into a copy of the last one. Buildout checked every box. Firms across the network now build listing packages, owner reports, demographics, property websites, and more from one streamlined system instead of starting from scratch.
"Since moving to Buildout, we have this one vision that we come together as a brand," Matt says. "We show up as Coldwell Banker Commercial through and through across the markets that we service, with all of our brokers looking the same, but having their own flavor and uniqueness to each piece."
The efficiency gains have been dramatic. Building a full marketing package, including demographics, client logos, and maps, has gone from a multi-day effort to a matter of minutes. "Things that would take days to finish are now taking 20 to 30 minutes," Matt says.
The biggest win is what that time makes possible. Matt describes his job as keeping brokers focused on the work only they can do, and Buildout is how he delivers on it.
"What it's allowing us to do is for me to keep our surgeons in surgery, to keep our pilots in the cockpit," he says. "It allows our network to not have to worry about marketing because it's taken care of. You can check that box. Our brokers can focus on what they do best, and that's focus on commercial real estate."
His advice to other CRE leaders is simple: "There's a lot of disparate systems out there. Find one that talks altogether. That's what we've done at Coldwell Banker Commercial, and that's why we've chosen Buildout."
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