A boutique DFW brokerage spanning sales, leasing, investments, property management, and aviation real estate replaced siloed systems and a homegrown CRM with one platform – without cutting a single role.
The opportunity to truly invest in your team, the people that you have, and utilize a tool such as this, will have a momentum effect in your company
Vision Commercial's systems weren't broken, but they were holding the firm back. "Before Buildout, our systems were functional. They worked. They were not efficient as we needed them to be," explains Trenton Price, President & Principal Broker at Vision Commercial Real Estate. "Originally, we had some natural siloing of different departments and divisions."
Part of the problem was a system the firm had built itself. "We had our own CRM that we created internally. The challenge with that was you have to constantly enhance it, improvements, and we're not a tech company and didn't want to spend all our time doing that," Trenton says. "So, it bogged us down in some of the routine processes and didn't allow our talent to be maximized."
Finance felt it most. "Whenever we had to do reconciliations, we would spend a considerable amount of time identifying one singular transaction or expense from one end of our books to the other," he says.
For a firm that measures success in relationships, that lost time mattered. "Our business is service, which means our business is people."
Trenton wasn't looking for a tool that would force Vision to change how it works. "Some software, you are really bending to the software more than it is working for you, and that's what we tried to avoid," he says. "We wanted something that understood how a commercial real estate firm operates, and we wanted software that fit within our processes and systems."
Buildout gave Vision one connected platform for marketing, brokerage operations, and backend finance. Today, about 70% of the business runs through it. "Right now, our current workflow, we probably have about 70% of our business runs through Buildout in some way, shape or form," Trenton says.
The change reached every department. Tasks now move automatically from one team to the next. "Being able to collaborate and have one task automatically go to the next group that needs to handle it has had a compounding effect in terms of saving us a considerable amount of time," he says.
Seeing the whole workflow also changed how the teams worked together. "It gave the opportunity for people to see, or our teams to see how other departments were working and how their process contributed to or hindered someone else's workflow," Trenton says. "And it became more of a collaborative approach to improving our systems and processes in a way that we just weren't doing to the same scale before."
The results show up across the business. "If I had to guess, I'd say we probably saved 20-30% of the man hours to do those tasks now, as to what we did before," Trenton says.
Reconciliations that once ate up an afternoon now take minutes. "Buildout's ability to code specific identifiers for each of those, allows us to find those things a lot faster," he explains. "So, now if we've got a singular issue, we can track that transaction in minutes, what used to take us a whole afternoon."
Marketing has improved too. "In terms of our lead generation, through their syndication networks and just enhancements to our marketing, we've seen a 10-12% increase month over month from before we used Buildout to after," Trenton says.
Most importantly, the efficiency went back into Vision's people. "We certainly didn't reduce staff with technology. We saw it as an opportunity to enhance the human capital that we have," he says. "We really focused more on how can we get more efficient and provide additional service for our customers, and it allows us to do that, because we don't spend as much time on the mundane tasks."
His advice to other firms: "I would say, the opportunity to truly invest in your team, the people that you have and utilize a tool such as this, will have a momentum effect in your company."
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