Heritage Realty Partners

The challenge

Before

Heritage Realty Partners — a family-owned brokerage with around 80 agents — wanted to invest in a shared agent portal: CRM, listing pipeline, and commission tracking under one roof. They had three options on the table: build custom, buy an existing commercial platform, or accept the bundled software from a national chain that had been courting them. The founder was overwhelmed by vendor pitches, worried about a 5-year mistake, and unable to get a clean comparison from anyone with a stake in the outcome.

• Three competing options (build, buy, national chain bundle) with no unbiased comparison
• Vendor pitches stacked with feature lists but no TCO modeling
• No documented map of how the 80 agents actually worked day-to-day
• Commission tracking happening across spreadsheets and broker-of-record memory
• Listing pipeline visible only to the listing agent — no shared brokerage view
• Founder unable to confidently say what was a must-have vs. a nice-to-have
• Sunk-cost fear pushing toward the most expensive option by default
• No shared technical architecture position across the leadership team

The solution

What we built

We ran a 3-week Digital Strategy engagement built around evidence, not opinions. We interviewed 8 agents, 2 ops staff, and the broker-of-record, then mapped the real workflows underneath the brokerage — not the workflows the vendors assumed. We evaluated 4 commercial platforms against those documented requirements, and modeled a 3-year total cost of ownership for each option (build, buy, bundle). We delivered a written thesis with a clear recommendation: build phase 1 — CRM and commission tracking — on MSP-managed infrastructure, and defer the agent-facing listing tools to phase 2 once adoption was proven. The client moved forward with us on phase 1 with no scope changes in the first sprint.

How the system flows

1. Stakeholder Interview Plan→Agent / Ops / Broker Interviews→Workflow Map
2. Requirement Synthesis→Must-have vs. Nice-to-have Matrix→Decision Criteria
3. Vendor Evaluation: 4 Platforms→Feature Fit→Integration Cost→Lock-in Risk
4. 3-Year TCO Model→Build / Buy / Bundle Scenarios→Sensitivity Analysis
5. Written Thesis→Phased Roadmap→Phase 1 Scope Definition→Architecture Recommendation