6 Ways CRE Brokers Can Get More Out of Claude (What I've actually learned using it in the field)

I’ve been using Claude daily for the past several months across tour prep, LOIs, market surveys, and client communications. It’s become a real part of how I work, but it took some time to figure out how to use it well. The biggest shift wasn’t learning what Claude can do; it was learning how to give it enough context to not waste my time.

Here’s what actually works.

1. Treat Claude like a new hire and brief it accordingly

Claude is like a smart entry-level employee. It will work hard, move fast, and produce polished output, but if you hand it a task without context, it will make assumptions. In CRE, wrong assumptions are expensive. Before you ask Claude to draft an LOI, write a tour follow-up, or pull together a market survey, tell it who you are, who the client is, and what you’re trying to accomplish. The more specific the brief, the better the output. Think of it like onboarding someone new. You wouldn’t hand a junior broker a deal and say, “figure it out.” Don’t do that to Claude either.

2. Set up a Project and actually use it

Claude has a feature called Projects that acts like a dedicated workspace. Instead of starting a new conversation every time and re-explaining yourself, you create a Project for a specific client, listing, or assignment, and everything lives there. Context carries. You can upload the requirements, the comps, the prior emails, and Claude holds all of it across conversations. For active assignments, we keep a Project open from the first call through the signed lease or closed sale. It’s the difference between Claude being a tool you have to constantly reload and an assistant that actually knows where the deal stands.

3. Write a Custom Instruction once

Claude lets you set a custom instruction that loads every time. Use it. Write two or three sentences about who you are, what market you work in, the types of deals you do, and how you like information presented. Something like: “We’re a commercial real estate brokerage in the DC metro market handling tenant rep, leasing, and investment sales. Communicate in a direct, numbers-first style. Always lead with the bottom line.” You do this once. From that point forward, Claude isn’t starting from zero every time; it’s already calibrated to you.

4. Use Memory for the things Projects can’t hold

Memory is different from Projects. Projects hold the assignment. Memory holds you: your role, your market, your recurring clients, the way you like to work. Turn it on and tell Claude what matters. Over time, it stops feeling like a tool you’re constantly managing and starts feeling like an assistant that knows your business.

5. Be specific about the output you want

Claude will give you whatever you ask for, which means if you’re vague, you’ll get something generic. If you want a two-paragraph tour follow-up that doesn’t sound like a template, say that. If you want a property summary that leads with PSF and TI, say that. If you want it to write like you, paste in an example of your writing and tell it to match the tone.

The ceiling on Claude’s output is almost always the ceiling on the quality of your prompt. The brokers who figure that out early get an assistant that actually makes them faster. The ones who don’t end up with polished mediocrity they still have to rewrite.

6. Build a Skill for the work you do over and over

This is the one most brokers haven’t figured out yet. Claude lets you build Skills, which are basically reusable instructions for tasks you do the same way every time. A lease analysis, a market survey format, a BOV outline, a comp set workup—anything you’ve done more than five times and will do five hundred more times.

Take lease analysis. Every broker has their own way of pulling apart a lease: base rent, escalations, free rent, TI, options, recovery structure, surrender clauses, the gotchas. It’s the kind of work that takes an hour or two per lease and follows the same shape every time. That’s exactly what a Skill is for. You walk Claude through how you analyze a lease, share two or three of your past write-ups, and ask it to help you build the Skill. It’ll draft the instructions, you refine them, and from that point on, you can hand Claude a lease PDF and get back an analysis in your format, in your voice, in minutes instead of hours.

The best part is you don’t have to build them from scratch. Claude will help you build the Skill itself. Think about how much of your week is repeatable. For most brokers, it’s more than half. Every Skill you build is a piece of your workflow that gets faster and more consistent every time you use it. Three or four well-built Skills will change how your week feels.

The Bigger Picture

The brokers and firms who get good at this are going to punch above their weight for a while. CRE has always been partly a resources game. The shops with bigger research teams and bigger marketing budgets could move faster and show up sharper, and that mattered. But it was never the whole story. This business runs on relationships, and the brokers who win consistently are the ones spending the most time in front of clients, not the ones with the biggest back office.

That’s where AI actually helps. It compresses the work that used to eat your week: the market surveys, the tour books, the follow-up emails, the call lists, the lease abstracts. Done well, it gives you back hours. What you do with those hours is the real question. The brokers who use them to generate more business, take more meetings, and stay closer to their clients are the ones who’ll see it show up in their numbers.

The resources gap is closing. The relationship gap never will. AI just lets you spend more time on the side of the equation that actually compounds.

Adam Collins, SIOR

SVP, Commercial Real Estate & Investments

BPG Holdings