Inspiring Leaders in Our Changing Industry: Helen Calvin, Buildout

This summer, Connect CRE is producing a series titled, “Inspiring Leaders in Our Changing Industry” as a follow-up to last summer’s “Leading in Tough Times” series. We’ve selected leaders around the U.S. and across the commercial real estate spectrum to discuss significant changes in the industry and their organizations. In this installment, you’ll hear from Helen Calvin, CEO of Buildout.

Charting a New Course: How do you navigate the transition from established practices to pioneering new frontiers?

There’s an idea that embarking into uncharted territory means departing from everything that came before, but that can be a recipe for disaster. Great innovation often lies in the connective tissue between ideas. In Buildout’s case we have successful products, an incredible team supporting them, and a decade of experience enabling broker wins. We have an almost unheard-of 99% retention rate for our customers and don’t take for granted that we are partners to our customers not simply another vendor. As we navigate our future, we’re doubling down on where every service we offer can integrate with another to make our customers’ lives that much easier..

Catalysts for Change: What are the essential elements for achieving significant progress within your organization and the industry as a whole?

We are lucky to serve a large, loyal customer base full of incredible experts in their field. One of my favorite things with our customers is that they prefer to refer to themselves as advisors, more than brokers. They counsel and coach their clients through all of the shifting investment and market conditions and that impulse extends back to us. We get incredible feedback from the people using our products and every single employee at Buildout is empowered to ensure what they learn is embedded in how Buildout moves forward. It is essential to recognize the wealth of knowledge that you can tap into from the people, both internal and external, who have the most direct experience with what your business serves. Listen and learn from everyone you can.

The Road Ahead: Looking forward, what critical changes do you foresee for the industry in the coming years? What advancements do you hope for?

Across all of the innovations we’re watching, especially AI, we’re hoping to see brokers take advantage of that critical split between what’s special and human, like building relationships, and what’s busy work that technology can do more efficiently at the same quality. Commercial real estate used to lag behind when it came to technology—manual methods still got the job done. Now, brokers are coming to us with questions about all of the emerging tech trends, eager to see how they can take advantage of every new change to amplify what they’re already doing well.

Jeff Bezos has a quote where he suggests we don’t try to predict what’s going to change in the future; rather, we focus on what’s not going to change. What will stay true in commercial real estate is that relationships will be essential and brokers will continue to be experts in growing their network and coaching people through huge financial decisions. Yes, the types of people involved will continue to change: we’re seeing a shift in the average age of a broker skewing much younger, and there are more kinds of commercial investors than ever before. But successful brokers will always be self-made and hungry, looking for any advantage they can leverage. We want to meet that appetite with tech solutions that reflect what brokerage is about, streamlining the complexity involved in commercial real estate. That means serving the whole brokerage as a partner, connecting full-platform, easy-to-adopt tools that allows people to simplify their work.

Click here to see the full Inspiring Leaders in Our Changing Industry series.