What is Enaia? Our Story.

As the founder of Enaia, Enaia’s story is the story of my career. I get asked a lot from our users how I went from being a CRE broker to technology startup founder - not exactly a common career evolution.

I spent a decade as a CRE broker, mostly at CBRE - the largest commercial real estate services company in the world.  I was an occupier and landlord rep in NYC and ran my business the same way everyone else did: spreadsheet insanity. Dozens of tabs. Color coding. Hacked-together formulas. It technically “worked,” but only because brokers are resourceful enough to make anything work. Did it slow me down? Absolutely.

CRMs? They never stuck - every system was either too complicated, too rigid, too slow, or too detached from the way the business actually operates for brokers.

Then I watched as a pivotal shift across every large CRE services company was underway - every large CRE services firm decided they needed to become equally as regarded for being data and technology companies as they are for being transactional businesses.  I watched these companies do what, understandably, every large company does when it wants better insights into its own data - have Salesforce (or any other large CRM provider) build a CRM that can be rolled out across the company. Companies like CBRE, JLL, etc. effectively pattern-matched themselves with other large companies that have made Salesforce work well enough, but when these products were rolled out to brokers, nobody adopted. By the time the Salesforce rollout hit brokers, brokers would roll their eyes and drift back to Excel and Outlook because at least those technologies were easy to use.

It wasn’t that we hated technology; we just hated technology that slowed us down and wasted our time.

As everybody knows, there’s no salary in CRE brokerage. No cushion. No structure.  If a tool takes more than it returns, brokers can’t afford to use it, so these CRM’s would eventually be scrapped and the company would rinse, cycle, repeat - hoping the next CRM would produce different results.  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, look no further. CRE brokerages operate differently than most large enterprises so the standard for pushing technology to brokers is much, much higher.

In theory though, these companies are right that their greatest asset IS their data. They’re right that they sit on mountains of it, but what they failed to recognize is that their BROKERS are the most effective distribution channel for delivering value (and data) to their Clients. In short, these enterprise-first CRM initiatives were trying to extract data while offering nothing in return to the end-user - brokers. They certainly weren't thinking about how to empower brokers to deliver this data to their Clients.

What I realized is that the problem wasn't that these companies had too great of a vision - it's that their vision was too small. When I spoke with the digital leaders working at these large CRE service companies, they all said the same thing: “Good luck but brokers just don’t want to use technology." I heard just about every company say this.  I would often counter with “Can you name one technology brokers didn’t adopt you think they should have?”  The answer was always "No. Not really." Solving complicated problems requires a greater commitment to the solution than solving small problems and these companies just didn't care enough.
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I was a broker. I had an iPhone in my pocket and was using technology 24/7 in my daily life.  I was craving a system that would help bring some organization and structure to the unstructured and often chaotic life of a CRE broker.  I took it as an insult that these leaders (whose salary was paid for by broker commissions) made brokers out to be some type of caveman or backwards idiot. I wasn’t afraid of technology - I was afraid of not succeeding and I didn't have the luxury of hiding behind a salary and clocking in and out between 9 and 5. I needed solutions that helped me. I would have been thrilled if CBRE offered me technology that actually moved the needle for my career.

Eventually, I left CRE brokerage to work for a developer in NYC where I ran leasing for the company’s portfolio of office buildings.  On my first day, the firm’s Chairman told me “David, I didn’t hire you because you’re smart. I hired you because brokers said great things about you.  Don’t forget that we lease our buildings because of them. In a city as large as NYC, there’s only a small amount of brokers that, if they know about our availability and trust us as landlords, we’ll lease our assets.  If they don’t, we won’t.”  

This was the beginning of my conviction that brokers play a much larger role within the industry than they're recognized for.  Brokers are the industry’s only data-distribution-network.  They’re the information highway and lifeblood of the commercial real estate industry. They're also the heartbeat of their brokerages, from small brokerages all the way up to JLL and CBRE.  In fact, at every CRE service company, brokerage is the largest contributor to EBITDA there is.  When these companies don't prioritize their brokers, they are penny-wise and pound-foolish.

So I figured that while brokerage enterprise leaders may not care about building great technology for their brokers, our startup experiment would be in doing just that.

Our original mission was simple and has never changed - build technology 10x better than the spreadsheets CRE brokers are using. In other words, we weren’t trying to build a replacement for company systems - we just knew that these systems were adopted so begrudgingly that there was a huge opportunity to deliver value from the bottom-up, starting with brokers.

Some of the greatest products in the world were built in this "bottom-up" way, notably Slack. Slack became our inspiration because it was a platform loved by its users when companies were forcefully mandating Microsoft Teams and other clunky systems on employees (my understanding is MSFT Teams has improved significantly since then). When small teams adopted Slack, they were effectively saying "Screw it" to company mandates to use internal data platforms because productivity and revenue trump everything else in reality. As David Sacks (who coined the term “bottom-up SaaS”) said “A decade ago, there was a really sharp divide between consumer and enterprise (technology).  These spaces were highly compartmentalized…I think most founders now see this consumerized (user-first) approach as probably the best way to develop enterprise software.”

This became our product strategy - build for individual users and their teams. The rest will come. Is it harder? Absolutely. Worth it? For sure.

So I started asking myself:
What broker problems need to be solved first?
What would a technology platform look like that captures the nuances of occupier rep and landlord rep brokers?
How can we design the application specifically around their actual way of operating - not how corporate wants them to operate?

So before writing a single line of code, I started talking with brokers in my network. Hundreds of them.  I spoke with over 500 brokers before we ever started designing Enaia. Some brokers embraced me. Some thought I was crazy. It was a crucial part of our success.

As I shut up and listened, the opportunity materialized:

·      Brokers didn’t need or even want another CRM. The application needed to be unique to the profession.

·      Brokers expressed that most CRM's aren't built for the dynamic nature of the business.

·      Brokers all said they needed simplicity and ease-of-use above all.

·      They wanted prospecting advantages and deal-flow hacks to run their entire business from one system.

·      And they needed better access to data, faster, and not just their own data but external data like contact data, company data, news insights and more.

The first version of Enaia was not sexy. It was simple, fast, and intuitive - a direct replacement to the spreadsheet. Some brokers loved it. Some went back to Excel…but the “aha” moment is when those users came back to Enaia.  Gabe DeJesus, Partner at Foundry Commercial, was one of those brokers. When I caught up with him, he said “I started using Enaia and went back to Excel files and thought “Wow. What am I doing?”

At first, Enaia was free, so I was nervous about whether brokers would actually pay for the platform but we lost zero users when we began charging. Success.

From there, the product evolved the same way it started: by listening to users and really engaging with them. Brokers told us they were spending too much money on products like ZoomInfo so we built Contact Enrichment within the platform (we even began suggesting who Key Decision Makers are with 97% success). Brokers told us they struggled to produce Client-ready reports without blocking off hours of their time so we built the industry’s best institutional quality occupier rep and landlord rep leasing reports (we even had a significant landlord in Chicago cancel their subscription with a leasing reporting software they were paying for because of our PDF’s). Brokers told us they either didn't know how to prepare or spent too much time preparing financial analysis for their deals (or they were waiting too long on their company’s analysts) so we built AI leasing financial analysis (it’s awesome!). Brokers told us they needed a clean way to manage complex client accounts, so we began building Client-facing portals that enable a broker to give technology to their Clients (coming soon but reach out if you want to see it).

And through it all, one thing stayed the same:

Our name - Enaia - which means care, protection, and diligence.

We chose that word because it captures exactly how we think about CRE brokers.

Brokers are the most important stakeholder in the entire commercial real estate industry yet they're often treated as superfluous. Nothing could be further from the truth - they generate revenue for their brokerages; they do their own sales, marketing and even revenue collection; they identify opportunities with very little support and secure Client relationships all on their own; they guide clients through the messiness of transactions and smoothen out the chaos of deal friction. They carry the company’s brand as walking, talking brand representatives.

Believe it or not, brokers are involved in over 90% of CRE transactions, and CRE is the world's second largest investment sector.

Brokers are the channel through which enterprise value flows to Customers and, as stated earlier, brokers are the greatest EBITDA contributors within every CRE services company.

Enaia was built to magnify their role - to make brokers more successful, protect their time, and support the diligence they already bring to the industry every day.

Today, we have a lot more users but every Enaia user still knows they can call or text my cell. That’s important to me. We didn’t build Enaia in a boardroom, over-engineering the product before shipping it to customers. We’ve built Enaia in the trenches, with brokers, for brokers.

Our approach - bottom-up innovation - wins because it’s rooted in real-life problem solving and obsessing over the sheer amount of details that define every great product.

So to every broker who has ever given us feedback, sent us screenshots, pointed out an issue, or said, “Hey, here’s how I think this could be improved,” thank you. Enaia exists because of you.

We have boatloads of testimonials that fuel our ambition. Just yesterday, Andrew Riley (EVP @ CBRE) sent me an email saying “(I’m) so thankful to have Enaia to help keep me organized.  I’ve never used a CRM before and this has been such a relief and improvement to my process.”  A few weeks ago, Stephen Cisarik (Managing Director @ Newmark) called me and said “I can’t thank you enough for building Enaia.  I honestly think I might have left the business if my team wasn’t using this.”

These are the people that their own companies often said “don’t want to use technology."  Nothing could be further from the truth.

And to those executives still begging their brokers to adopt Salesforce, shoot me a note. We can help. Your brokers shouldn’t be weighed down by systems that disrupt their success – because their success is your success.

Our story started with a desire to solve problems and ultimately became a powerful mission because CRE brokers don't get the credit they deserve.

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- David Young, Founder of Enaia