Commercial Real Estate Lead Generation Cost: What CRE Data and Outreach Actually Price At

Commercial real estate lead generation costs $99 to $699 a month for property and ownership data at published rates, plus $29 to $49 a month for outreach software, plus metered extras that almost nobody budgets for. Reonomy publishes from $500 a month monthly or from $400 a month billed annually. PropStream publishes $99, $199 and $699 a month. CoStar, Crexi and LoopNet publish nothing at all.

The number that actually decides a CRE prospecting budget is none of those. It is 7.5 to 10 cents, the price per record of getting public property data out of the platform and into a spreadsheet.

That is the meter. Not searching, not seats, not features. Every figure below was read directly from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026, because the roundups ranking for this query repeat each other and several quote numbers no vendor lists.

What commercial real estate lead generation actually costs

A solo broker or a small property services firm can run a complete prospecting operation for roughly $2,000 to $2,500 a year: the cheapest credible data tier, workspace-priced outreach software, two sending domains and four mailboxes. A team that needs Reonomy's annual plan and real export volume is looking at $5,500 to $7,000. Neither number is large next to a single commercial commission, which is why cost is rarely the reason CRE prospecting fails.

Why the export meter matters more than the subscription price

Read Reonomy's monthly plan carefully and something odd appears. It includes unlimited searches and full access to the web app. It includes zero exports. Taking data out costs $75 a month per thousand records, as a separate line.

PropStream lands in the same place from the other direction. The subscription is cheap, and then additional exports start at 10 cents each and a deed or mortgage document costs $5. A recorded deed is a public county record. Anyone can read it at the recorder's office. The $5 is not buying access to a secret, it is buying you not having to go and fetch it.

So two independent vendors, with completely different business models, both price bulk extraction of public property records at roughly 7.5 to 10 cents per record. We have not seen that benchmark published anywhere, and it is far more useful for planning a campaign than any headline subscription price. If you want a list of 5,000 industrial owners, the honest cost line is $375 to $500 of export capacity, not "a Reonomy subscription".

The reason the meter sits there is worth naming. When the underlying records are public by law, a vendor cannot sell access, because access cannot be withheld. The only thing left to sell is extraction: normalizing thousands of county formats, resolving an LLC on a deed to a human being, and letting you take the result away in bulk. That is a real product. It is just not the product the marketing implies, and the difference decides whether upgrading buys you anything.

It also makes the monthly bill genuinely unpredictable, since exports, skip traces and mailers all accrue outside the subscription. Metered data tooling is the classic case for putting a real-time budget alert on the card before a list-building week turns into a four-figure surprise.

The free source that undercuts the paid ones on lease timing

Here is the part no CRE data vendor advertises. The field commercial prospectors want most is a lease expiration date, and it is the one field no platform can reliably sell, because leases are private contracts and no county records them.

Except when a building's mortgage gets securitized. Under Item 1111(h) of Regulation AB, an SEC-registered commercial mortgage securitization must file asset-level data on every property in the pool. The fields are set out in 17 CFR 229.1125, Schedule AL, Item 2. Paragraphs (d)(25) through (d)(27) require the largest, second largest and third largest tenant at each property, the square footage each occupies, and the date of lease expiration for each one. The same filing carries the property name, street address, city, state, zip, county, property type and occupancy.

Tenant name, square feet, lease expiration date, street address. Free, on EDGAR, as machine-readable XML attached to Form ABS-EE.

It is not hypothetical. EDGAR full-text search returns 6,669 ABS-EE filings mentioning leases, and 114 filed in the twelve months to September 2026 contain the exact phrase "date of lease expiration". We pulled one at random, the July 2026 filing from Wells Fargo Commercial Mortgage Trust 2016-C37 (accession 0001888524-26-013833). A single XML exhibit held 157 properties, 61 street addresses and 160 dated tenant records, naming occupiers from Verizon Business Network Services to Dollar Tree and Hibbett Sports, each with square footage and an expiration date.

What that free feed will not do, measured

We checked it properly rather than just celebrating it, and it has three limits.

Staleness is the big one. Schedule AL requires the tenant fields "based on the most recent annual lease rollover review", which is not the same standard as current. In that 2016-vintage trust, only 53 of 160 dated lease records, just 33 percent, had an expiration date of 2026 or later. Two thirds described leases that had already run out. Only 19 of the 157 properties carried any recent rollover review date at all. Treat every row as a lead to verify, never as a fact to quote at a prospect.

Coverage is structural, not random. Item 1111(h) applies to SEC-registered offerings. A securitization placed privately under Rule 144A files no Form ABS-EE, so the private slice of the market is simply absent. We are not putting a number on how the market splits, because we could not verify one from a primary source, and an invented ratio would be worse than an admitted gap.

And a property only appears if it was securitized at all. A building on a regional bank's balance sheet, or owned outright, is nowhere in this data. Where a property does appear you get three tenants, not the rent roll. A forty-suite office building shows you three suites.

That produces a coverage bias worth stating plainly, because it is the reverse of what people assume about public data. This feed skews toward large, institutionally financed assets. Whether a building is visible depends on how it was financed, not on how good a prospect it is. The strip center that would love to hear from a broker is invisible; the trophy tower with four brokers already calling is fully documented.

What to actually spend money on

Rank the spend by what changes your reply rate rather than by what fills a feature grid.

• The trigger comes first. A dated reason to write, whether a loan maturity, a recorded sale, an ownership tenure or a named tenant, is worth more than any volume of records. Published benchmarks put a genuinely researched opener at 8 to 15 percent positive replies against 3 to 5 percent for a good generic template and around 1 percent for an unedited blast.
• Then export capacity, sized honestly. Work out how many records you will actually contact this quarter and buy that, rather than buying a tier for a workflow you do not have.
• Then sending infrastructure. Never prospect from the domain your deals, letters of intent and closing correspondence run through. Separate sending domains at $10 to $15 a year, three to four mailboxes each, warmed, at 30 to 50 sends a day per mailbox. Around 150 a day is where deliverability problems begin.
• Then software, workspace-priced. Per-seat outreach pricing punishes exactly the small brokerage this category should serve best.

Purchased CRE lists deserve their own warning. They are resold repeatedly, so the owners on them have already heard from everyone, and they carry no timing signal at all. Building your own list from ownership records plus a dated trigger costs roughly 7.5 to 10 cents a record and outperforms a bought list by a wide margin.

The full vendor comparison, the Schedule AL field list and the honest caveats live on our commercial real estate lead generation software page. If the list already exists and the problem is that nobody has been contacted yet, that is what cold outreach software is for, and our own pricing is $39 a month on annual billing for the whole workspace rather than per seat.

One closing thought on CRE specifically. Unlike a job posting or a federal solicitation, a lease expiration is not a deadline you are racing. It is a date twelve to twenty-four months out that tells you when the decision becomes urgent for someone else. That makes commercial real estate one of the few markets where patient, scheduled, genuinely researched sequencing beats speed, and it is miserable to run by hand.