Why Technology Will Enable Brokers, not Replace Them

Technology has been upending the way various sectors do business. While some adaptation can be attributed to the pandemic, most of the changes were underway before COVID-19 made it necessary. Net lease leads the discussion in the commercial real estate sector. That’s according to Camille Renshaw, CEO & co-founder at B+E who, along with president and co-founder Scott Scurich, sought to create a net lease brokerage firm that blends the strengths of both real estate and technology sectors.

B+E stands for Brokers plus Engineers.  “[The name] was our founding employees making a bet on human plus tech,” says Renshaw. “Many companies are structured to be heavily people focused with limited technology services available to clients, or vice versa – all tech interfaces and no human advisory.  We believe the future of commercial real estate will blend the two approaches.”

Most net lease buyers are submitting offers via B+E’s proprietary digital platform before seeing the subject property; many are no longer conducting property tours before closing. The founders foresaw these single tenant, net lease trends when first structuring the company to complement senior broker talent with exceptional technology.  For a brokerage company to thrive in a post-Covid world, as B+E has done, its technology platform must leverage greater speed across all deal tasks, provide unrivaled transaction efficiencies, and ultimately drive stronger asset value.

And technology it has. At ICSC’s ”Here, We Go” event, B+E plans to showcase a new dashboard for sellers, which compiles real-time activity and market feedback from potential buyers to give sellers insight into investor behavior, pricing interactions, and their property’s overall sales performance.

B+E says their new dashboards will help give sellers more control and confidence in selling their net lease real estate. Seller Dashboards utilize proprietary technology to compile real-time data and activity, giving sellers one dashboard to stay up to date on everything related to their property and tenant.

Whether managing a large portfolio of properties or a single deal, sellers are able to analyze and compare metric for metric how every property is performing to make more informed investment decisions. Renshaw notes that B+E has teams dedicated to finding ways to make selling net lease real estate easier through AI-driven tech and industry-leading data sets.

“Having access to real-time market activity and data puts the seller in control,” says Renshaw. “Not only can they see offers ranked, but they’re able to securely share data and get an interactive calendar showing all of their critical dates.” This continuous flow of communication makes for a transparent transaction process and gives sellers vastly more insight on their deals than the typical selling experience.

That flow of information is crucial to B+E’s approach, as it allows for better transparency between broker and client, and thus a stronger relationship. It’s all part of the philosophy that acknowledges the broker as indispensable, just more so.

“There was this fear that technology would make the broker go away,” says Renshaw. “The opposite is true.  Great technology can scale the broker and make us all better at what we do.”

B+E will be giving live Seller Dashboard demos at the December ICSC Here, We Go conference in Vegas at booth 4962. For more information or to set up a virtual demo of Seller Dashboards, visit their platform here.