Pricing
What CRE software actually costs when you’re the only broker
Most commercial real estate software is priced per user, which sounds fair until you are the only user.
The major CRE CRMs were built for brokerages: firms with a dozen agents, an office manager and a back office that needs commission vouchers. The pricing follows that design. Per-seat rates in the US$79 to US$129 range are common, marketing tiers run higher, and several platforms add a fee per brokerage on top of the per-seat cost, which is where the arithmetic turns against a solo operator.
For a forty-agent firm, a fixed platform fee is rounding. Divided by one, it can be most of the bill.
The consolidation makes this less avoidable
Buildout acquired Rethink in February 2021 and Apto in January 2022. Three of the names a broker would have compared five years ago now sit with one owner. That is not a scandal: the products are good and the teams knew the industry. But fewer independent vendors means fewer people whose business depends on serving the one-person shop specifically.
What a solo leasing broker actually needs
Not pipeline analytics across forty agents. Not a commission engine. Four things:
- To be told which leases are coming up before the tenant starts talking to someone else.
- To not lose the enquiry that comes in during a showing.
- To send a client something that looks like it came from a real firm.
- To keep all of it somewhere that is not eleven spreadsheets.
Everything past that is a brokerage feature you are paying for and not using.
Questions worth asking any vendor
- What does it cost for exactly one broker, every fee included, in writing?
- Is there an annual contract, and what happens if you stop paying?
- Where does your client book physically live, and can you export all of it?
- Does it understand additional rent, co-broke splits and provincial licence details, or was it built for the US market and translated afterwards?
- Does it track CASL consent per contact, or is that still your problem?
That last one matters more than most brokers think. CASL applies to your contact list whether or not your software helps you with it.
Where the number comes from
Before you compare anything, put each offer in the same units. The net effective rent calculator does that for a lease; the same habit applies to software: one broker, one month, every fee, before tax. On that basis Frontage is CA$0 for the records and CA$49 for the full desk. The pricing page works the months out.
Disclosure. We build Frontage, a leasing desk for independent Canadian brokers: CA$49 a month, a free tier that does not expire, Canadian-hosted, bilingual. We are newer and smaller than everything named here, and if you need deep marketing automation or US market data, Buildout is the better product. We wrote this because per-seat pricing built for brokerages is hard to evaluate when you are one person, and the arithmetic should be visible before a sales call rather than after.
Prices quoted for other products are ranges from their published pricing as of September 2026 and move; check the vendor’s own page before relying on any figure.