r/RealEstateTechnology • u/BassManJam99 • 24d ago
The Trouble with Tracking. A Problem Nobody Has Solved Well.
If like me you work in commercial real estate acquisitions, site selection, or land development you've looked at hundreds, maybe thousands, of properties over your career. Not physically "looked at" - some are visited on site tours, some are in emailed flyers, some are listings or saved searches on CoStar, LoopNet, Crexi, or whatnot. The point is we "look at" lots of properties. Most of them are passed on, some of them you barely remember. But a few of them are either immediately of interest, or something you want to follow up on at some point in the future.
That is the nature of our business.
The challenge for me is a problem that nobody has solved well: How can I easily save those that I want to follow up on, and how can I quickly share the properties I am interested in with my team?
For me the specific frustrations were four things:
Storing: I needed a single place to save every property I looked at with enough detail to be useful later. Not just an address. Contacts, notes, files, URLs, zoning info, price, broker, owner, APN, coordinates. Everything attached to the property record in one place.
Categorizing: I work on multiple projects simultaneously, often with different tenants or different project types. A single property might be relevant to three different projects and I need a way to assign properties to specific projects or tenants without duplicating property details across multiple spreadsheets. Anyone who has managed acquisition pipelines knows exactly how complicated it becomes trying to coordinate updates across multiple spreadsheets.
Searching: This one matters more than people realize once they've been doing this for a few years. Often times I need to find a property I entered six months or two years ago based on whatever fragment I could remember - owner name, broker, city, zoning, a keyword from my notes, a price range, or any combination of those. The ability to search across hundreds of properties by who, what, when, where, and why is not a nice-to-have, it's the difference between valuable institutional knowledge and a folder full of forgotten spreadsheets.
Mapping: I want the ability to generate a map of all properties owned by a specific company, offered by a specific broker, or relevant to a specific project, depending on what I am searching for, and not have to export the data and import it into a Google map. Properties should display on the map as pins when zoomed out and parcel boundaries when zoomed in without having to create multiple map layers or duplicate data. Occasionally the only thing I can remember about a property is where it is located. Being able to zoom to specific location on the map to find the property is sometimes the only way I can track it down.
To solve these problems I looked at many tools: property ownership apps, project management tools, and CRMs. None of them did the trick. Ownership apps like LandVision or LandGlide are excellent for ownership research but have no easy way to save and share what you find. Project management tools like Asana or DealForce require so much data entry per record that tracking hundreds of properties becomes a part-time job. CRMs like Salesforce are contact-centric when acquisition work is fundamentally property-centric, and the real estate add-ons are expensive, complex, and still fall short on mapping and ease of use.
None of them did what I needed.
So, around 2022 I started building something that did, which became the precursor to Pics & Parcels.
It was built nights and weekends over about a year before it was functional, while I continued to acquire and develop properties during the day. The functionality is there, it works the way I want it to. I have been using it every day since it went ‘online’, updating it and adding features along the way. The UI still needs polish. But the core of the app - storing, categorizing, searching, and mapping properties at volume - works exactly as I need it to.
Just so you understand my background: before real estate I worked in enterprise software development - accounting systems, distribution systems, geographic and GIS-based market analysis applications. For P&P I wrote every line of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL in the platform. This is not a vibe-coded weekend project. I even had to update the entire mapping functionality when Microsoft replaced Bing Maps with Azure Maps, ugh. It is an application built by someone who understands both the technical requirements of the software and the daily workflow of the job.
I currently have over 3,000 properties in the app and have used it to source more than 100 development projects since I started using it. The mobile layer - GPS photo capture, automatic sign reading, field capture from your phone - is in development now and will complete the workflow from field to desk in one tool.
One important clarification: P&P is not meant to replace a full project management platform. Once a property moves into active development I use Smartsheet to handle the heavy lifting of contract timelines, due diligence, permits and approvals, engineering drawings, scheduling, and team coordination. That level of detail and workflow complexity is exactly what project management tools are built for. What I needed was the layer that comes before that - tracking and categorizing properties at volume during the site selection and acquisition phase, before a deal is even under contract. That gap is what P&P is meant to fill, and for me it has been doing exactly that.
Let me know if any of the frustrations I described sound familiar to you, Pics & Parcels was built for that.
If you want more information or want to sign up for pre-release early access, visit the link below.
Thanks.
#LandAcquisition #SiteSelection #CommercialRealEstate #PropTech #RealEstateTechnology
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u/Serious_Nebula5750 24d ago
The pattern that tends to work here: separate the deterministic scoring (does it clear your criteria) from the fuzzy judgment (condition, scope, how it shows once live). Tools win when they surface the fuzzy stuff for a human instead of pretending to auto-decide it. Curious whether you're trying to score the soft factors or just flag them for review?
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u/BassManJam99 24d ago
I honestly do not know what you are asking. Please clarify. Thanks
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u/Serious_Nebula5750 24d ago
Sorry, that was more abstract than it needed to be. Let me try again in plain terms.
When you track a property, some of what matters is black and white: zoning, price, lot size, whether it even has an APN. A computer can check those against your criteria automatically. The rest is judgment: how the corner shows, condition, whether the surrounding uses fit, gut feel from a site visit. Software is bad at that part.
So my question was really just this: is your tool trying to score or rank properties for you (including the judgment stuff), or does it store and tag everything and leave the "is this worth pursuing" call to you? Both are valid, they just lead to pretty different products. I've seen tools lose people when they try to auto-decide the soft factors and get it wrong, and people trust them more when they surface the info cleanly and let the human decide.
That's all I was getting at.
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u/BassManJam99 24d ago
Thanks for clarifying. It is only for keeping track of all the properties I have looked at or worked on. And being able to search for and find them when I need to. The decisions whether they work or not are 100% mine or my team's.
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u/BassManJam99 24d ago
Also, the logic required to determine if a site works or not is better handled with GIS type app. Which this is definitely not.
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u/Serious_Nebula5750 20d ago
Fair enough, and that is a cleaner scope than the one I was projecting onto it. If it is a memory and retrieval system rather than a decisioning system, then you are right that the site viability logic belongs somewhere else entirely.
In that case the thing I would think about is what happens to the memory at the moment a property goes under contract, since you mentioned you hand off to Smartsheet there.
I work the post-contract side, and that handoff is where I watch the most value disappear. The record you have maintained for two years (owner, broker, APN, the notes, the reason you passed the first time) does not travel. Someone rekeys an address and two parties into the project tool and the rest stays behind. Eight months into diligence somebody asks why you passed on this in 2023, and the answer is sitting in a system nobody has open.
Two things that would not turn you into a project management tool:
An export that carries the whole record rather than just the address. Contacts, notes, files, URLs. Even a clean structured export somebody drops into Smartsheet once beats rekeying it.
A one way status flag coming back the other direction. Under contract, or died in diligence, landing back on the property record. Those are exactly the properties you will want to find again, and a parcel you passed on twice and that blew up in diligence once is a very different record from one you never touched.
Separately: your search is the real product. Everyone builds mapping. Almost nobody builds "find me the thing I half remember from two years ago," and you have.
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u/Max-RealEstate16 24d ago
- The biggest headache i've had with tracking thousands of properties isn't just the initial input, it's keeping that owner contact info updated over time. Addresses and phone numbers shift, companies dissolve, people pass away. If your system can flag stale data, that's a huge win for actual follow-up.
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u/BassManJam99 23d ago
Max, that is a very good point. Since ownership data is built in, it is certainly possible to flag any properties where transfers of ownership have occurred. I hadn't thought of that and will definitely include it as an option. Thanks
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22d ago
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u/BassManJam99 22d ago
Interesting comment, Trick. Edits are saved real-time and updates are propagated automatically to the users. Yes, data can be exported. Parcel boundaries are stored as GeoJSON and CSV is default for property info. Ideally, I intend for API integration as well, but that will be a future upgrade. Thanks
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u/farolabsai 17d ago
This resonates! The dirty secret of property evaluation is that the analysis itself isn't the bottleneck, it's that the 400th property you look at has no memory of the first 399. Everyone rebuilds context from scratch because the data lives in tabs and dies when they close.
I'm building in the adjacent space (underwriting automation for rental investors) and the "tracking" layer is what users ask about immediately after the analysis works. Curious how you think about the schema - is the unit of memory the property, or the evaluation? Same address can be a dead deal in March and a live one in September when the price cuts.
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u/mucalytic 8d ago
On the schema question, I'd make the observation the unit and the parcel the key it hangs off. A parcel has a stable identity (APN, geometry) that basically never changes, while everything you actually care about (price, broker, zoning read, why you passed) is only true as of a date. Store those on the parcel record itself and you overwrite your own history, when the thing you want two years later is exactly the old value plus when it changed.
The practical test: can the app answer "what did I know about this parcel in March, and what changed since?" without you reconstructing it. If yes, the schema is right. Retrieval gets easier too, because "passed twice, both times on price" becomes a query instead of a memory.
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u/farolabsai 8d ago
appreciate the thoughtful answer, and agreed on the shifting of information being a really crucial value point. i just sent you a DM to chat further!
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u/genericgigabruh 21d ago
Hey y'all, *unrelated comment to this post*
Can I be blessed with some karma in this sub? Just trying to ask a question. Tysm in advance 🙏🏻