RI Marketplace Partners With Buildout

CRE property online auction platform RI Marketplace and property showcase site Buildout announced that they’ll cooperate, each giving its customers the ability to use the other’s offerings, the two said in a press release.

RI Marketplace describes itself as an online commercial real estate auction platform. It holds periodic auctions of a variety of properties. A quick look shows mixed-use, hotels, multifamily, retail centers, office, student housing, and more. It offers two-day auction events, absolute auctions with a $1 reserve, custom auctions, and marketplace listings. It’s courting potential investors.

Buildout calls itself an “all-in-one commercial real estate platform for brokerages and enterprise organizations.” It offers a variety of capabilities, including owner research and outreach tools, CRM for brokers, property marketing software, and brokerage back-office software.

“Buildout, which provides a streamlined and efficient marketing process for its customers, will now offer the option to display its client’s property listings on Marketplace,” the release says. “Buildout subscribers will be able to automatically publish active sale listings to Marketplace’s listings page at no cost. Changes to listings made in Buildout will automatically synchronize with Marketplace. Leads generated from Marketplace will appear in the client’s dashboard on Buildout.”

So, it’s a tradeoff. RI provides the mechanisms to conduct auctions to sell properties, with people who need to promote them more widely.

The approach is similar to one that RI Marketplace did just last month with SharpLaunch. SharpLaunch customers can now easily opt-in to have their sales listings displayed on Marketplace’s Listing page and automatically updated in real time as listing statuses are modified, all with the click of a button,” the release said. The crossover uses application programmer interfaces (APIs) that allow communications of data between the two companies without the need to manually reenter data.

In these cases and others, proptech and CRE companies are partnering with one another to provide get extra business while gaining capabilities that they would otherwise have to invest in.

The hope, at least for now, is that the entire industry can start to grow more, based on building cooperative business arrangements. Similar patters happened in the older days of high tech when such deals were common. They began to fall away in large part as the biggest of the firms, typically with some sort of platform, bought out other companies and brought in their own development teams to expand what they could make and sell.