Commercial Real Estate Lead Generation Software: CRE Prospecting Tools, Property Owner Data and Commercial Real Estate Leads

You generate commercial real estate leads from four sources, and they are not equally priced or equally crowded. Ownership records tell you who controls a building. Transaction records tell you what just changed hands and who financed it. Occupancy records tell you who is in the space and until when. Relationships tell you everything the records cannot, which in a market this closed is most of what actually closes deals.

The paid platforms concentrate almost entirely on the first two. Reonomy, PropStream, CoStar and Crexi all sell some version of the same core: search 50 million or so US commercial properties, filter by asset class and square footage and ownership tenure, resolve the LLC on the deed to a human being, and export a list. That is genuinely useful work. County assessor and recorder data is public but scattered across thousands of separate offices with no common schema, and normalizing it is a real engineering job that deserves to be paid for.

The third source is where the market gets interesting, because occupancy data is the one CRE prospectors want most and can almost never buy. If you are a tenant rep, a landlord rep, a commercial mortgage broker, or any vendor who sells into buildings, the useful moment is not when a property trades. It is when a lease is coming up. Lease terms are private contracts between two parties and no county records them, which is why no data vendor can simply go and get them.

That is the gap this page is about. There is a narrow, legally compelled, completely free channel through which some commercial lease data does become public, and it comes from securities regulation rather than property law. Most CRE prospecting advice never mentions it. Before we get there, the prices.

Here is the structural finding, and it does not appear in any roundup of this category. Look at what Reonomy actually sells on its monthly plan: unlimited searches, full access to the web app, and zero exports. You can look at everything and take nothing. Exports are a separate line item at $75 a month per thousand.

PropStream arrives at the same place from the opposite direction. Its subscription is cheap, and then it charges 10 cents for each additional export and $5 for a deed or mortgage document. A recorded deed is a public county record. Anyone can walk into the recorder's office or use the county portal and read it. The $5 is not buying access to a secret. It is buying you not having to go and get it.

Put the two together and a benchmark falls out that we have not seen published anywhere: two independent vendors price bulk extraction of public US property records at roughly 7.5 to 10 cents per record. Reonomy's $75 per thousand is 7.5 cents. PropStream's additional exports start at 10 cents. That is the real market price of getting public property data into a spreadsheet, and it is a far more useful number for budgeting a prospecting campaign than any headline subscription price.

This is the same meter we found in federal contracting, where HigherGov tiers on records per search export rather than on features. It is worth naming why the pattern recurs. When the underlying records are public by law, a vendor cannot sell access, because access is free and cannot be withheld. The only thing left to sell is extraction: normalization, resolution, and the right to take the result away in bulk. So the meter moves to egress. Sales engagement tools meter seats and sends, construction platforms meter map area, freight databases meter contact reveals, and public records platforms meter exports. Once you can see which meter you are on, you can tell whether an upgrade buys you anything.

The practical test is simple. If your workflow is researching thirty target buildings and calling the owners, exports are irrelevant and the cheapest tier is correct indefinitely. If your workflow is building a list of every industrial owner in four counties to run a sequence against, the export ceiling is the entire product and the cheap tier is useless. Most CRE teams are in the first group and buy as though they were in the second.

A free federal feed that names tenants and dates leases sounds too good to be checked, so we checked it. It has three real limits and you should know all of them before you build a workflow on it.

The first limit is staleness, and it 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 the 2016 vintage trust we parsed, only 53 of the 160 dated lease records, just 33 percent, had an expiration date of 2026 or later. Two thirds described leases that had already run out. Worse, only 19 of the 157 properties carried any recent annual lease rollover review date at all, twelve of them in 2026 and six in 2025. The data is mandated. The freshness is not enforced with the same rigor, and it varies by servicer.

The second limit is structural. Item 1111(h) attaches to SEC registered asset backed offerings. A securitization placed privately under Rule 144A is not a registered offering and files no Form ABS-EE. So the feed covers the registered slice of the CMBS market and is silent on the private slice. We are not going to put a number on how the market splits between the two, because we could not verify one from a primary source, and an invented ratio would be worse than an acknowledged gap.

The third limit is the widest. A property only appears if its mortgage was securitized at all. A building financed on a regional bank's balance sheet, or owned free and clear, is nowhere in this dataset. And even where a property does appear, you get the top three tenants, not the rent roll. A multi tenant office with forty suites shows you three of them.

Which produces a coverage bias worth stating plainly, because it is the opposite of what people assume about public data. This feed skews toward large, institutionally financed assets. It is a byproduct of a capital markets obligation, not a property obligation, so what determines whether a building is visible is how it was financed, not how good a prospect it is. The small multi tenant strip center that would love to hear from a broker is invisible. The trophy tower that already has four brokers calling is fully documented. Use the feed for what it is genuinely good at: verifying, enriching and dating what you already suspect about institutional product, and finding named corporate occupiers you can approach directly.

CRE lists are small and the recipients are reachable, which cuts both ways. A county of industrial owners might be four hundred names, and those four hundred people are also being called by every other broker in the market. Volume is not the lever. Specificity is.

The single highest leverage thing you can do with any of the data above is put the specific fact in the first line. Not "I work with industrial owners in the southeast" but the property, the tenure, the tenant, the date. If the record says a named tenant occupies 40,000 square feet with a lease running to a specific quarter, say so. That is an opener that cannot have been sent to anyone else, and it is the difference between the 3 to 5 percent positive reply rate published for a good template against a targeted B2B list and the 8 to 15 percent published for a genuinely researched opener.

On the sending side, the rules are the same as in every other vertical we have measured and brokers break them constantly. Do not prospect from the domain your active deals, LOIs and closing correspondence run through, because losing that domain's deliverability in the middle of a transaction is a far more expensive problem than a slow pipeline. Buy separate sending domains at $10 to $15 a year, run three to four mailboxes on each at $2 to $4 a month from a reseller or $7 to $8.40 a seat on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, warm them, and hold each warmed mailbox to 30 to 50 sends a day. Around 150 a day is where deliverability problems start.

On the legal side, CAN-SPAM regulates commercial email in the United States rather than banning it, and it does not require prior consent. What it does require is accurate sender information, a subject line that is not deceptive, a working opt out honored within ten business days, and a valid physical postal address in the message. Several states layer additional requirements, and if you are emailing tenants who are individuals rather than entities in California, that is worth a conversation with counsel. None of this is legal advice.

Finally, sequence for a long clock. 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 conversation becomes urgent for them. The right cadence for a CRE list is a light touch now that establishes who you are, and a genuinely relevant follow up as the date approaches, which is precisely the kind of scheduled, research backed sequence that is miserable to run by hand and trivial to run in software.