Technology's Impact on Account-based "Multi-Market" CRE Transactions

Over the past two decades, account-based CRE services (or "multi-market" CRE services) have quietly grown from an edge case to a dominant force in commercial real estate services. As corporations have become larger, more distributed, and increasingly global, they’ve needed more than just local market brokers—they’ve needed centralized partners capable of managing every square foot within their portfolio across geographies, service lines, and crises.

Enter "account"-based brokerage: a business model built to service enterprise clients with complex real estate needs—companies like Google, Pfizer, or Microsoft, that require transaction management, portfolio strategy, benchmarking, and disaster response all under one roof. These clients don’t want to manage dozens (or hundreds) of brokers across dozens (or hundreds) of markets. They want a single relationship, a single dashboard, and consistent execution. Pfizer, for example, occupies facilities across more than 180 different countries and territories. This trend towards contract-based CRE outsourcing means that CRE is no longer purely local anymore. The rise of account-based brokerage has changed the rules - and the winners will be those who adapt.

Naturally, the largest CRE brokerages have followed suit to try and support such complicated logistics. CBRE, JLL, Colliers, Cushman & Wakefield, Newmark and others carve out dedicated account teams with promises they will deliver speed, consistency, risk mitigation and embedded services such as project management, facilities oversight and data reporting—all bundled into one long-term contract. Given that outsourcing is becoming more cost-effective and in-house real estate teams are under pressure to “do more with less,” this approach makes a lot of sense.

But along the way of trying to support these complex client accounts, something important has been neglected - the brokers themselves who are the lifeblood of every CRE services company.

The Disconnect Nobody Talks About

What makes CRE firms attractive to these large clients in the first place is their vast network of brokers—boots on the ground, tuned into every local market nuance, armed with real-time intelligence on who’s expanding, who’s contracting, what is "market," and what the local market peculiarities, taboos and norms are.

That’s what large CRE services enterprises pitch. That’s what wins the work.

But once the contract is signed, those local brokers are surprisingly left out. Account teams operate on separate systems, different platforms, and disconnected workflows. The result is siloed processes, missed opportunities, and slower response times—the exact opposite of what these clients were promised. The chaos simply shifts to the service provider—who often lacks the necessary infrastructure—making these accounts substantially less profitable than they should be.

And here's the irony: many of these enterprise relationships started from single transactions with general brokers—scrappy one-off deals that built trust over time. As the client grew, so did the relationship, eventually becoming formalized into an "account." Yet in the current structure, the very brokers who won the relationship are often sidelined, a reality that doesn't just impact the broker but the client as well, often losing a key figurehead (the broker) who has deep domain expertise in working with that company.

Traditional Brokerage Still Drives Profit

Despite all the talk about scaling services and embedding teams, traditional brokerage remains the core profit engine of CRE service firms. It may not drive the most revenue, but it remains the largest EBITDA line item—the number Wall Street cares about most (and the largest CRE service companies are all publicly traded).

Unlike traditional brokerage, Account-based contracts often rely on significant pass-through revenue and fixed-fee structures, making them lower-margin even if greater and more stable revenue sources. The greatest opportunity for large CRE firms is in discovering efficiencies that only software can generate. Without purpose-built software-enabled efficiency, CRE firms pour human and capital resources into account-based strategies that don’t drive operational efficiency for the brokerage's bottom line. This inefficiency exists because brokers are often an afterthought in product design when they are a mission-critical stakeholder for service execution.

Why are brokers an afterthought? Because building technology for brokers is hard. It requires more than just reporting dashboards built from the top-down and mandated across the organization—it requires thoughtful workflows, minimal disruption, and seamless integrations into how brokers already operate - in other words, it requires a clear identification of what their problems are focused prioritization to solve those problems. That’s not the comfort zone of internal technology teams who seldomly engage with brokers. So they punt. And when adoption lags, they blame the brokers: “They just don’t use technology.”

Wrong. They use great technology all day long. They simply don't adopt technology that offers little value in return.

Large CRE Companies need a Unified Platform—Not a Disparate set of Half-Hearted Technologies

Nearly every industry has benefited from collaboration technologies, but CRE services are often plagued by the entrenched interests that brokers have that differ from Account-leaders. If you want to unlock the full power of account-based brokerage, solve for this as a product mandate and critical problem to solve. A unified platform that integrates account-leaders, transaction brokers and client experience will be the first of its kind.

• Brokers surface opportunities that feed into strategic portfolio planning
• Account teams get real-time visibility into local market activity with faster communication cycles
• Benchmarking improves
• Reporting becomes automated
• Execution speeds up
• Clients feel the difference, knowing that what they were pitched is what they're getting

This is one of the reasons for Enaia's core architecture that accommodates project-based collaboration that reflects real-world CRE requirements. We’ve designed our system with brokers at the center—because that’s where the CRE value chain begins. From there, we enable seamless collaboration with account leads, service providers, and client experience. Whether it’s a one-off renewal or a portfolio-wide optimization, our system connects the dots, creating automated reminders of lease expiration dates, AI-powered financial lease analysis and more.

The Opportunity Ahead

Corporate real estate outsourcing isn’t slowing down. In fact, it's expected to grow significantly as companies prioritize efficiency, flexibility, and speed, but the infrastructure to deliver a world-class client account experience—one that actually harnesses the full strength of a global brokerage network—is still missing.

This gap leaves space for miscommunication, missed savings, and even contract vulnerability, especially in distributed organizations where local market activity flies under the radar of central account teams.

The winners in the next era of CRE won’t be the firms that simply win the contract. They’ll be the ones who can actually execute—seamlessly, intelligently, and connected—across their entire ecosystem. That requires more than a new team or a legacy technology. It requires a new platform built how all great products are built - one brick at a time.

And the truth is: it’s still up for grabs.

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