Starting Stacks
What to actually buy, in what order.
A database tells you what exists. It does not tell you what to do on Monday. These are the stacks we would put in place ourselves at each portfolio size, sequenced, with real numbers and an explicit list of what to skip.
The six-center owner
1-5 centersYou own a handful of centers, you do your own lease review, and your bookkeeper handles the rest. You have no analyst and no IT budget.
Expect to spend
$0 to about $120/mo to start
Start with the free tier of a general assistant and one lease tool. Do not buy a platform. The failure mode at this size is paying enterprise pricing for software that assumes staff you do not have.
- 1NotebookLMtracked, not yet verified
Free. Load one lease and ask it questions. This is the safest possible first contact with AI, because a wrong answer costs you nothing and teaches you the shape of the thing.
- 2Claudetracked, not yet verified
The generalist. Drafting, summarizing, working through a rent roll. Free tier is enough to decide whether the paid tier is worth it.
- 3LeaseLenstracked, not yet verified
Free to abstract, pay only to export. Run one real lease through it before you consider anything with a sales call attached.
- 4Deferredtracked, not yet verified
Only when you are trading up. Often $0 versus $1,000-1,500 for a traditional QI.
What to skip
Skip everything with "platform" in the description until you have run the four above for a month. At your size the constraint is your attention, not your software budget.
The growing operator
5-30 centersEnough centers that spreadsheets have started failing you. You have a property manager and a bookkeeper. CAM reconciliation is now a real annual event.
Expect to spend
Roughly $300 to $900/mo, depending on property count
This is the size where one operations system plus one document system earns its keep. Buy the operations layer first, because it removes recurring work rather than one-time work.
- 1Re-Leasedtracked, not yet verified
Commercial-landlord property management sized for this portfolio, rather than multifamily software bent into shape. Handles critical dates, which is where money actually leaks.
- 2Docsumotracked, not yet verified
Invoices and rent rolls into structured data. Pays for itself against bookkeeper hours if you process any real volume.
- 3Claudetracked, not yet verified
Paid tier at this point. Lease review, tenant correspondence, first-pass analysis.
- 4CompStaktracked, not yet verified
Comps without calling in favors. Worth it once you are transacting more than once a year.
What to skip
Skip Yardi and MRI at this size unless a lender or partner requires it. You will pay enterprise pricing for a fraction of the feature set.
The institutional portfolio
30+ centersYou have an asset management team, a controller, and probably a system of record already. The question is what to layer on top.
Expect to spend
Enterprise. Assume five figures annually.
At this size the buy is not tooling, it is integration. The tools below all assume someone owns the data pipeline. If nobody does, buy that first, internally or not.
- 1Prophiatracked, not yet verified
Portfolio-wide lease data rather than one-off abstraction. The value shows up in reporting, not in the abstraction itself.
- 2Placer.aitracked, not yet verified
Trade-area and foot traffic at portfolio scale. Replaces commissioned studies you are probably already buying one at a time.
- 3Zentilitytracked, not yet verified
Utility extraction feeding CAM. This is the least glamorous line on the page and often the fastest payback.
- 4Cactustracked, not yet verified
Acquisition diligence at volume, where analyst hours are the binding constraint.
What to skip
Skip anything that cannot show you its output before you sign. At this price point a pilot on one asset is a reasonable ask and a vendor who refuses it is telling you something.
Or don’t do it yourself
We install these stacks for a living.
Everything above is genuinely doable on your own, and plenty of owners do. If you would rather it was running by the end of the month, wired into the systems you already use, that is the work.
Book a CallWork With Us
Your team already has AI. Almost nobody uses it.
The licences are bought and the accounts are open, and most of them sit in a tab nobody opens on a Tuesday. Woodworks Realty Studio gets an assistant into the hands of every person on a team, one at a time, each one set up around how that person actually works. My own business runs on it before any of it reaches anyone else.