A commercial real estate broker should choose lead generation software that finds the right person at a company or behind a property-owning entity, lets the first email mention a specific building or space, and keeps a follow-up date alive for months. Lease decisions are made long before the lease ends, so a tool that sends two emails and quits wastes your list. Budget $12 to $150 a month for the software; a single 30,000 square foot industrial lease can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in commission, so the tool cost rarely limits you, and the quality of the list does.

One deal is large, so the math favors patience

Take an illustrative industrial lease: 30,000 square feet at $8 per square foot per year is $240,000 a year, or $1,200,000 over a five-year term. If your commission is 4 percent of the first five years of rent, that is $48,000 before any split with your firm. Rates and splits are negotiated, so use your own. The point of the arithmetic is the ratio: a $99 a month tool stack costs $1,188 a year, and it needs to contribute to one deal every few years to justify itself.

That ratio also means you should spend your effort on list quality. Five hundred well-chosen companies beat five thousand scraped ones, because every email names a building and a reason.

The two lists a broker keeps

Occupiers. These are the companies that rent or buy space: a logistics firm outgrowing its warehouse, a medical group opening a second office, a manufacturer whose lease ends in 14 months. The buyer is usually the COO, CFO, head of facilities or real estate manager, and at a 50-person company it is the owner. Our guide to finding office managers and facility managers covers the smaller companies, where the person you want has a title like "operations manager".

Owners. These are the people behind buildings you might list or sell. Public county records usually show the owner of record, and that is often an LLC. The software cannot make an LLC into a person. You find the person behind it from the entity's state filing, the property manager, or a company website. Read how to find commercial property owners before you buy any data product, because the free route covers more than most brokers expect.

What software cannot know

Lease expiration dates, square footage in use and rent paid are not on a company's website, and no email database knows them for most tenants. You learn them by asking, from your own market knowledge, or from the occasional press release about a hire or a new location. Be skeptical of any tool that claims to list lease expirations for every company in a market unless it names where it gets them and lets you test a sample against buildings you know.

What software can see is public evidence of growth: a careers page showing ten openings at the Columbus site, a news post about a new product line, a "locations" page that lists a second facility. Those are good first lines. They are also what separates an email a facilities manager answers from a form letter.

What to require

  1. Search by title and by place. You need "operations or facilities leaders at companies within 20 miles of this submarket", not a state filter.
  2. Let your own list in. Owners and prospects from your own property searches, county records or past deals should import without a fee, so you are not paying twice for names you already have.
  3. Write from the company's own pages. The first line should mention the facility or hiring, and the tool should be able to read it from their site.
  4. Store a lease date and a space size. If the CRM cannot hold "lease ends June 2028, 25,000 sf, wants dock doors", you will keep it in a spreadsheet and the tool will not help you.
  5. Run long and slow. A "not yet" in March is a reason to write again in September with a market update.

What the pieces cost, as published on October 30, 2026

On its pricing page Hunter listed Starter at $49 a month ($34 billed yearly) for 2,000 credits and Growth at $149 ($104 yearly) for 10,000. UpLead listed Essentials at $99 a month ($74 annual) for 170 credits and Plus at $199 ($149 annual) for 400. For sending, Instantly's Growth plan was $47 a month ($37.60 yearly) for 5,000 emails and 1,000 uploaded contacts, and Smartlead's Base plan was $39 ($32 annual) for 2,000 active leads. Property and ownership databases sold to brokers generally ask you to talk to sales for a price; ask for a month-to-month term and a sample of ten buildings you already know before you sign.

Brokers also send from a personal address, which is a mixed blessing: it feels human, and it has a daily limit. See how to warm up a Gmail account for cold email before you send more than a handful a day.

The email rule that applies

The Federal Trade Commission's CAN-SPAM compliance guide says the law "makes no exception for business-to-business email". Each message needs your valid physical postal address, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days. Penalties can be up to $53,088 for each violating email. A brokerage's office address in the signature meets the address rule. If you are unsure how the rules treat cold messages in general, is cold email legal goes through it.

A worked example

Say Alder Ridge Commercial, two tenant-rep brokers in Columbus, wants industrial users that need 20,000 to 80,000 square feet. One of them, Nadia, writes the target: "Operations, finance and facilities leaders at logistics, light manufacturing and food companies with 50 to 500 employees within 25 miles of Columbus that list a facility on their site." She wants 120 contacts a month.

Her first email: "Hi Greg, your careers page shows eleven openings at the Groveport plant. If that growth means you are running short on dock doors or floor space, I track every 20,000 to 80,000 square foot industrial space between Groveport and Obetz and can send you the three that fit. Would a short list help? Nadia, Alder Ridge Commercial, 480 N High St, Columbus, nadia@alderridge.example.com. Reply "stop" and I won't write again."

She follows up on day 6 with one listing, and on day 18 with a one-paragraph market note on vacancy in the submarket. Anyone who writes "our lease runs to 2028" gets a note dated 12 months before that, titled with the lease end. After 90 days she has 360 contacts worked and a spreadsheet of 31 replies; she records which of those named a lease date, because those are the ones worth a call. Her numbers will differ from any benchmark, and she should treat them as hers to track.

For the finding, writing, sending and follow-up part of that routine, Rocketship takes a sentence like Nadia's target, reads each company's website, finds the right people, emails from your own Gmail and puts the meeting on your calendar. It does not pull county ownership records or lease expirations, and it does not send from Outlook or message anyone on LinkedIn, so owner lists you build yourself come in as an import. Finding 120 new people a month costs about 480 credits, which fits Launch at $24.99 a month (500 credits, up to 70 emails a day); the pricing page lists every plan, and the 7-day trial needs a card on file.