Prospect

The pivot

The platform had good bones. Real data, a familiar structure, something brokers could recognize. The problem was it was built for investors, not brokers, and those two users want completely different things.

Investors browse. Brokers hunt. They need to know which properties are worth a call, who the real owner is, and how to get there before anyone else does. None of that was in the product yet.

A broker's day, before

Before Prospect, finding out if a property was worth pursuing meant opening a lot of tabs. Public records, LLC registrations, county databases, search engines. You might spend an hour tracking down an owner only to find out the contact was wrong or already being worked by someone else.

Smart saved searches didn't exist either. If you set up a search and walked away, you had no way of knowing when something changed. You had to come back and check manually, or miss it.

What we built

We built four things that changed that workflow directly.

The first was Smart Saved Search. Set your filters once and walk away. When new properties match or existing ones get updated in our index, the broker gets notified. No manual checking, no missed windows.

The second was the algorithm badge. Every property gets a confidence tier: Likely, Very Likely, or Extremely Likely to sell or refinance within a year. There is no bad score, just a signal of how strong the data is for that area. It gives brokers a way to prioritize without having to read between the lines.

The third was AI Contact Lookup. Instead of the tab archaeology a broker used to do, our AI agent runs the search, pulls from multiple sources, matches results against our records, and surfaces a ranked recommendation with every source listed. Brokers can verify manually if they want, but most of the time they don't need to.

The fourth was Lists and the Console. Brokers could organize properties into lists and then work through them in the Console, a lightweight workspace for cold calling. Notes, tasks, contact history, all in one place. Not a full CRM, but everything a broker actually needs while they are in the middle of a call.

The migration

When Buildout acquired ProspectNow, 400 customers needed a new home. Prospect was it. Before the migration started, I went through the ProspectNow feature set and identified anything that was missing in Prospect. Mailers was the main one. We got those gaps closed before anyone moved over.

400 customers migrated. 12 churned. The rest stayed and moved to the new plans. A 97% retention rate through an acquisition migration is not something that happens by accident. The product had to be ready, and it was.

The outcome

Prospect ended up being more than a redesigned product. Because we had more freedom to build it the way we wanted, it became a testing ground for what a shared design language across all of Buildout could look like. The patterns we established here, the components, the decisions we kept making the same way across screens, those became the foundation for Blueprint.

It was also the first Buildout product to be converted to Blueprint once the system was ready. In a way, Prospect both inspired it and got to prove it.