Project Basics | Listing Projects | Assignment Projects | Project Management
Project Basics
Buildout upgrades the Marketing tool that Buildout is known for and provides a number of tools for project management that can be used to track work & progress on both Listings and Assignments.
Listings & Assignments
A Listing is any property where you or your brokerage is representing the owner or the landlord, whether it’s a sale or lease transaction. You can manage your listings’ marketing materials as well as coordinate marketing efforts across your office or team.
An Assignment is used to represent deals where your brokerage is representing the tenant or the buyer, again for either sale or lease transactions. Within assignments, you’ll find a place to track activity and tools to help your client find the space that’s right for them.
Collaborators
Our Projects tool was built to help include your whole team in your efforts to close the deal, and you can add additional Collaborators to your listings or assignments using the green plus sign next to the Brokers. Users with Manage Company permissions will be able to view all Projects within your office.
Collaborators can be other brokers in your office who aren’t listed on the deal, admins in your office, or even people from outside your organization with a Buildout account.
Listing Workspaces
A Listing Workspace is a combination of the Marketing functionality of Buildout alongside the activity tracking & project management of CRM. The majority of CRM functionality is contained within the Workspace tab that you’ll find above the Marketing tab after clicking into any Listing.
Workspace Tab
Overview
Here you can get a big picture view of all the things we help you organize with Projects.
Details
Here you will see the corresponding Property associated with this listing as well as any Related Contacts on that property. You can also add new contacts here to make sure everyone on your team knows who you’re talking to.
Predictions
As mentioned earlier, your Pipeline pulls information from Projects via the Predictions tab. For sale listings you’ll only have one prediction to make, and in the case of lease listings you might have several lease spaces that all have their own predictions, commissions, and close dates.
You can update a listing’s prediction by clicking on the gear icon and selecting Update Prediction. The other option to Edit will allow you to change the deal information alongside the rest of this listing’s data.
Leads, Tasks & Activity Feed
You’ll see each of these tabs within Workspace have their own section in the Overview. You can edit this information either within the Overview or by clicking into the section using the tabs under Workspace.
Tasks
Here you can view all of the upcoming tasks for this Project. You’ll see a list of all tasks created as well as who created the task, and to whom it was assigned. Open tasks will have a grey circle to the left and completed tasks will have a checkmark in the circle.
To create a new task you can use the New Task button, prompting you to fill out information about this task as well as attach any objects in the database to it (such as a relevant Contact or Property).
Finally, you can use the Download button to export your Tasks as a csv file.
Activity Feed
While tasks describe work you’re planning to do in the future, the Activity Feed displays all of the actions you and your team have taken in the past.
There are four ways to add activities to your project’s feed:
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Use the New Activity button |
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Complete any Task associated with this Project |
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Associate this Project with an activity you’ve created elsewhere |
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Copy the Project Forwarding Email on a relevant email |
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Leads
This new section allows you to collect & manage your Leads for this project in a single place.
There are several ways to add Leads to a project:
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Use the New Lead button |
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Clicking Actions followed by Import Leads and uploading a file |
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Using Actions in the Contact database to Add Leads to Project |
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Leads are also automatically created when people interact with your property plugin! They will be displayed in the Leads section with the source ‘Web Activity’ |
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Client Report
In addition to coordinating your internal efforts to push this project towards closing, you also have the ability to leverage those efforts to show off your progress to your clients using the Client Report.
Here you’ll be able to view a rollup of your leads, activities, and tasks as well as some metrics pertaining to website traffic and email marketing. You can also use the Custom Tile to create another section if you want to display information from outside Buildout.
Finally, once you’ve created your Client Report and got things looking the way you want it, you can use the Share button to send it to the Contacts on this project, which gives them a standalone URL that will automatically update as you continue to work the deal. Curious about what they’ll be seeing? Use the Preview button and you can see exactly how the data shows up on the client-side.
For more information about the Client Report, check out its feature release article.
Attachments
While we have a suite of tools you can use to manage and store your marketing materials, the Attachments tab allows you to store files or folders for internal use, such as Listing Agreements or any other specifics about the project that shouldn’t be open to the public.
Listing Tab
This section includes all of the functionality found within our Marketing product and lets you customize the documents, emails, and websites you’re sending to get people interested in the Listing. For more information about all of our Marketing functionality, check out our Marketing Help Center!
Deal Tab
If you have permissions to manage Back Office for your company, you’ll also see any Vouchers related to this Project displayed in the Deals tab. Even if you haven’t closed the deal yet, you’ll see Draft vouchers for any potential transactions and Estimated vouchers for anything you’ve input your own predictions into. For more information on Back Office & Vouchers, check out our Back Office section.
Assignment Workspace
An Assignment Workspace is used to track Tenant Rep or Buyer Rep deals, and like Listings is broken down into a Workspace tab and an Assignment tab.
Workspace Tab
Here you’ll be able to manage your team’s work on a particular Assignment very similarly to how you would within a Listings Project. Keep in mind that an Assignment will not have a Leads section or a Client Report, as these are both features designed for Listings.
Assignment Tab
Details
Here you’ll see all of the Requirements listed out for this Assignment. Need to change something? Just click Edit Assignment in the top right corner.
Survey
The Survey tab helps you manage all of the locations you’re showing to your client and lets you leverage your Property database to find that perfect spot. To add a Property to this list you can just click the Add Buy or Add Lease button in the top right of the page.
From there you’ll be prompted to either enter a new Survey Location & save it to your Database, or you can select a Property already in your Database to use as a Survey Location. You can also download your Survey Locations as a CSV file to share with your client!
Once you review these locations with your client you can use the Reject button to keep track of which locations you’re skipping, and you can always see these properties (and even Re-Add them) in the Rejected Locations section.
Deal
If you have permissions to manage Back Office for your company, you’ll also see any Vouchers related to this Project displayed in the Deals tab. Even if you haven’t closed the deal yet, you’ll see Draft vouchers for any potential transactions and Estimated vouchers for anything you’ve input your own predictions into. For more information on Back Office & Vouchers, check out our Back Office section.
Project Management
Now that you know how everything looks, let’s talk about how you can use these tools to organize you and your team to get the most out of the time you’re spending.
Checklists
An excellent first step to defining your routine for each deal is having a user with Manage Company permissions create Checklists for your company. These lists generate a set list of Tasks based on the type of deal and its current status.
These can be found in Company Settings > Checklists
Under each one of these types of deals, you’ll see there’s a status-based Checklist where you can create an automated list of Tasks that are generated as soon as the deal hits that status.
For each Task in the Checklist, you’ll need to specify the Type, Due Date, Title, Details, and decide who this should be assigned to.
You can either have Buildout dynamically assign the task to whoever the Primary Broker is on that particular deal, or you can have that particular task always assigned to the same user.
An example of a task you might assign to the Primary Broker is something that all Brokers on your team tend to do for their deals, like “Create BOV” or “Attach Signed Listing Agreement.”
For tasks that get assigned to a Specific User, a better example might be if you have a single admin at your office in charge of ordering signs. In that case, the “Order Signage” task could always be assigned to that particular admin so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Checklists allow your office to lean on Buildout’s automation so you spend less time typing in Task Details and more time getting things done. Your office likely already has a process or a checklist they’re following today, and mapping those into the Checklist function can be extremely useful.
Database & Projects
As you can imagine, using Database and Projects in tandem is the easiest way to get the most out of our platform. There are a couple of key ways that these two sections collaborate:
Creating a New Project
By clicking on any Property in your database you’ll see a green button labeled New Project which will take all of the data you’re storing in the Property record and pre-fill those fields within the Listing form. It will also carry over any pictures as well as Related Contacts so you have that info as you move forward with the deal.
Similarly, you can use either a Contact or a Company record and click New Assignment to create a new Buyer Rep or Tenant Rep deal. Requirements will be copied from the record as well as the Contact or Company’s information.
Using Properties as Survey Locations
You can add any Property as a Survey Location directly from any Assignment! Just click Add Buy or Add Lease and search for the Property.
Using Contacts/Companies as Leads
You can add a Contact/Company as a Lead in a Listing either through the Leads tab or by selecting several Contacts/Companies in the Database and clicking on Actions > Add Leads to Project
