Working Smarter: Turn Data You Already Have Into Your Competitive Edge

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The Pressure to Work Smarter

Brokerage is, at its core, an intelligence business. However, many brokers aren't fully leveraging all of the information available to them. Listing and property data services are essential tools, but every broker in the market sees the same listings, the same comps, and the same property information. In a crowded landscape, the difference-maker is what you uniquely know and how quickly you can act on it.

Speed, focus, and insight win deals. The brokers who outperform are improving their success rates by organizing and utilizing the information they gather daily to identify highly qualified properties. And they’re moving faster by developing their systems and processes to manage and enrich deal data.

The Problem: Fragmented Property Intelligence

Most brokers know the frustration: you remember a great property from two years ago that was on the market, but accessing information on a property you were tracking 24 months ago is a chore. Your information is fragmented: lease data is in one folder, sale comps are buried in another, and the junior analyst who researched the ownership details no longer works at the firm.

Add to that the flood of daily property marketing emails and the time brokers spend sifting through these messages to avoid missing out on opportunities or actionable deals. Then, when you do find a relevant property, it often means manually copying details from a PDF brochure into a spreadsheet or email, a process that’s time-consuming and prone to human error.

Even when this data is captured, it’s rarely structured in a way that makes it easy to analyze or compare across different deals or markets. Brokers might remember a key lease term or rent schedule, but finding that detail again can be a time sink. Plus, there’s often no way to ensure the information is relevant, especially when ownership, tenant mix, or market conditions change. In the worst cases, the data you have is years old, you cannot find a hard copy of the OM, and even if you could find it, the data may not be accurate.

This lack of structure isn’t just annoying, it's costly. It slows down your team’s ability to source new deals. It weakens your follow-up. It leads to duplicated outreach. And it prevents teams from building momentum over time.

Across many teams, decades of valuable market knowledge are trapped in email threads, static PDFs, or the minds of experienced team members with no structured system to utilize it, capitalize on it, or pass it on.

Proprietary Intelligence Is the New Differentiator

Many successful brokers are now investing in their own "proprietary intelligence" systems and processes that give them a proprietary edge.

This approach doesn't require them to build complex internal databases from scratch, nor will they hire a room full of analysts. Successful firms systematically capture and organize the knowledge and market data they are gathering every day:

• Offering memorandums with lease terms, tenant information, key property details, and market insights
• Rent rolls
• Past communications with property owners
• Internal notes on buyer criteria, property details, and past outreach results

Most teams have years of this kind of data, albeit often in fragmented systems that aren’t well structured. When structured and made searchable, this kind of intelligence becomes a business generation flywheel. Each deal, BOV, and conversation makes the system more powerful. Instead of starting cold, teams operate with a rich contextual database, even as staff changes and markets evolve.

How a Broker-Led Intelligence System Works

By capturing key details from offering memoranda, conversations with owners, public record data, and transaction history, it’s possible to assemble structured, searchable deal intelligence, providing your team with a clearer view of the market than any single platform can offer.

Here is a real-life example of how it works:

• A VP pulls up a filtered list of retail properties in the targeted trade area with low rents or shorter term leases.
• They sort by sub-type, building SF, term remaining, or rent PSF, all pulled from their deal history, past outreach, and saved OMs.
• They can quickly identify locations that meet a specific client's requirements.
• Ownership data and past notes are linked, so re-engaging a property owner takes seconds, not hours.
• Junior team members can prospect with greater confidence and expertise by using property-specific data, rather than starting from scratch. 

Instead of scattered files and forgotten PDFs, brokers are building living systems of intelligence, the kind that become sharper with every conversation, every opportunity, and every deal that hits the market.

How to Get Started Building Your Property Intelligence System

Step 1: Centralize What You Already Have

Start by pulling together all the property data your team already collects.. Whether it lives in folders, email, or spreadsheets, your first goal is to get it into one place. If you haven’t been in the practice of collecting property data, get started now. Within a few months, you’ll be able to build a solid foundation of property intelligence. You can begin by using simple tools like Excel or use your existing CRM, if you have one in place, to start creating structure. 

Step 2: Make Your Data Searchable and Connected‍

Once your data is centralized, add fields and tags to make it easily searchable. Organize by asset type, tenant name, lease term, cap rate, location, or any other attribute your team uses in day-to-day prospecting. Look for ways to connect data across touchpoints—for example, linking ownership info with historical sale comps and past outreach activity.

Step 3: Explore Tools That Can Automate Keeping Your Data Current‍

As your centralized property intelligence repository grows, you’ll want to enhance and update it continually. Some teams dedicate analysts to manage and update the information. Others pay for access to third-party data to enrich and update their data. Increasingly, firms are turning to automation tools or AI-driven platforms that can extract lease data, map properties, update lease terms, and flag changes. The key is to keep your data up to date so it is most useful for the team.

Top-performing teams treat their internal property knowledge like an asset. It becomes more valuable with every use, helping teams scale knowledge across new hires, clients, and deals. 

Over time, these intelligence systems will evolve into your competitive moat. They help you anticipate market activity, respond more quickly to client requests, and make more informed outreach decisions. And importantly, they scale with your team, so new brokers can quickly become productive by tapping into contextually relevant information that would otherwise take years to absorb.

The Opportunity Ahead

Differentiation for brokers comes from what you can uniquely know, recall, and act on. For Managing Brokers overseeing investment sales teams, enabling your people with access to better organized data isn’t just an operational improvement; it’s a strategic shift that accelerates success.

The good news? You don’t have to start from scratch. You already have the raw materials, years of deal history, OMs, outreach records, and market experience. Now it’s time to begin turning these kinds of data into your proprietary intelligence system.

We built DealGround to make it faster and easier for brokers to extract, organize, and make the information you gather every day actionable. Whether you develop your systems internally or lean on purpose-built platforms, the brokers who succeed next will be those who treat their market intelligence as an asset and put systems in place to leverage it every day.

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