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Macadam Forbes didn’t skip a beat in the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to Buildout

Cindy Leitner is the director of operations at Macadam Forbes, a locally owned brokerage providing the Portland metropolitan area with a complete range of commercial services. Representing more than 200 active listings across multiple markets, the firm has seen tremendous growth in recent years.

Even as they brought on additional brokers, they were able to use Buildout to keep their process streamlined in creating the marketing materials needed to win and close more deals.

The opportunity

With all the moving pieces of a deal, brokers can feel like there’s not much they can control outside of the strength of their materials.

That left Cindy’s marketing team with custom work coming in for every deal. Even the smallest update to a brochure required expertise in professional design software which limited who was able to fulfill those requests.

Plus, new brokers brought an increased interest in the latest CRE tech. They wanted to share digital materials with clients, but their existing process favored physical documents—and all the extra design steps for print-optimization that went with them.

Cindy saw a wedge happening in their marketing. They were getting bogged down by manual design work and weren’t satisfying brokers’ appetite for new tech-driven approaches.

It was time for a new system. It was time for Buildout.

Macadam Forbes documents
Macadam Forbes logo and colors
Macadam Forbes branding

Buildout makes a streamlined brokerage available in the cloud

When Macadam Forbes onboarded with Buildout, it was a battle to get all of their brokers to embrace the new tool. But Cindy and her support staff immediately took to the new way of working.

“To think that I have one marketing person for 25 brokers. We have over 200 listings and one marketing person creating everything, even new business materials.” — Cindy Leitner, Director of Operations, Macadam Forbes

Having all of their listing data and assets centralized online sped up their marketing and even freed them up from needing local servers and software—allowing remote work when required.

Before, changing the price on a listing could take up to three days, now a broker can update a listing in the system themselves and have it instantly applied everywhere that’s powered by Buildout—brochures, the brokerage website, and even third-party listing sites.

Thanks to Buildout’s white-glove onboarding process—including training, webinars, and all-hands—the Macadam Forbes brokers were able to see and embrace the platform’s full value.

Thriving under lockdown with Buildout

The COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges for every brokerage but, when Portland was issued stay-at-home orders in March 2020, Macadam Forbes was ready.

“If we didn’t have Buildout, we would not have been able to continue running our business. But we didn’t even skip a beat. There was no pause in creating marketing materials and—if anything—the pandemic caused us to refine our process.”

Cindy’s team traded links to Buildout listings and docs that stay consistent with every change made instead of multiple versions of PDFs in emails. They were confident in running their business virtually knowing they always had the latest changes at hand. 

And the value of the platform continues to prove itself. 

“We’ve been able to actually improve our marketing materials and dive more into everything Buildout can offer. Now I see it not just as a way for me to be more efficient, I see it as the backbone of our company’s marketing.”

Macadam Forbes is starting 2021 stronger than ever and plans on continuing to grow with Buildout.

Interested in finding out if Buildout could be the right software partner for your brokerage? Contact us and we can set up a call to learn about your business needs and the tools that can carry you forward.

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