Pricing
What CRE software costs for one broker (2026)
Most commercial real estate software is priced per user, which sounds fair until you are the only user.
Disclosure: we build Frontage, which appears in the table below. Every other figure comes from that vendor’s own published pricing page unless the row says otherwise, read in September 2026. Prices move; check the vendor before relying on any number.
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, and some platforms add a charge on top of the seat, which is where the arithmetic turns against a solo operator. For a forty-agent firm a fixed platform charge is rounding. Divided by one, it can be most of the bill.
What one broker actually pays
Same units for every row: one broker, one month, every fee, before tax.
| Product | Published per seat | Charges beyond the seat | One broker, cheapest | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AscendixRE [1] | US$79–99 a month | The Salesforce licence is included. An AI Suite add-on starts at US$39 a month by organisation size, and credit top-ups are US$650 per 100,000 | US$79 (about CA$111) | Billed annually |
| ClientLook (LightBox) [2] | US$129 a month, or US$1,068 a year | None published | US$89 (about CA$125) on the annual plan | Month to month available at US$129 |
| Rethink (Buildout) [3, 5] | US$129 a month (Rethink+ US$299), per user according to CRE Daily | CRE Daily, a third-party review, reports possible fees for database setup, brokerage licensing and optional premium support at US$2,400 a year | US$129 (about CA$181), plus any of those fees | Not published |
| Buildout [4] | From US$125 a user | Buildout says pricing is set by “per user seat count and platform maintenance” | US$125 (about CA$175), plus platform maintenance | Not published |
| Frontage | CA$0 or CA$49 a month | Optional phone line on the CA$49 plan, CA$5 a month plus usage | CA$0, or CA$49 for the full desk | Month to month |
Canadian figures convert at the Bank of Canada daily rate of 1.4002 on 18 September 2026 [6] and move with it. Where a vendor does not publish a fee, the row says so rather than assuming it is zero.
Two things fall out of that table. The cheapest serious option for one broker is AscendixRE at US$79, and it is cheap partly because it rides on a Salesforce licence you do not pay separately for. And the products that do not publish their extra charges are the ones where a solo broker is most likely to be surprised, because the charge that is invisible at forty seats is the one that lands hardest at one.
The consolidation makes this less avoidable
Buildout acquired Rethink in February 2021 and Apto in January 2022 [7, 8]. Three of the names a broker would have compared a few 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. That is the whole job of the free lease expiry check, and the sweep behind it works in a spreadsheet.
- 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? Two of the products above are cheapest only if you commit for a year.
- 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 record consent per contact, or is that still your problem?
If part of what you are paying for is an AI feature, it is worth knowing which jobs it actually does well before you pay for it.
That last one matters more than most brokers think. CASL governs the commercial electronic messages you send, and the burden of proving consent for each one sits with you [9]. Software that records consent and when it was given is not a compliance guarantee, but reconstructing it from memory two years later is not a plan.
Where our own number comes from
Put each offer in the same units before you compare anything. The net effective rent calculator does that for a lease; the same habit applies to software. On that basis Frontage is CA$0 for the records and CA$49 for the full desk, and the pricing page works the months out.
We are newer and smaller than everything named here. We are bilingual and your data is stored in Canada, though some AI processing happens outside Canada (see our AI post). 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.
Sources
Each vendor’s published pricing page, read September 2026, except where a row says otherwise.
- Ascendix, AscendixRE pricing, modified Jul 3, 2026.
- LightBox, ClientLook, read Sep 2026.
- Buildout, Rethink by Buildout, read Sep 2026.
- Buildout, Pricing, read Sep 2026.
- CRE Daily, Best commercial real estate CRMs for 2026, updated Sep 1, 2026.
- Bank of Canada, daily exchange rate USD/CAD, 18 September 2026, Sep 18, 2026.
- Buildout, Buildout announces acquisition of Rethink, Feb 23, 2021.
- Buildout, Buildout announces acquisition of Apto, Jan 19, 2022.
- Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (S.C. 2010, c. 23), section 13, current.
Figures move; check the vendor before relying on any of them.