The question cannot be answered because a generic sales system holds a deal as one record with one side and one stage. A commercial real estate deal has two sides moving at different speeds.
A managing broker asks where a deal is and gets seven answers from seven tools. Model the deal with two sides, each with its own stage.
Each chapter starts the video at that point.
A managing broker asks a simple question on a Monday: where is the Harbor Street lease right now? And gets seven answers. The listing platform says the space is still available. The sales system says negotiation. The inbox has a counter from the tenant's broker on Friday. The draft lease is in a document tool with tracked changes. The signature tool shows nothing sent. The commission spreadsheet has a row with a question mark. The books have no invoice. All seven are true, and none is the answer. This is not an adoption problem.
It is a modelling problem, and this video is the model that turns the question into a read of one screen. Everything on screen is a mock demo of Zoho CRM with sample data: an invented brokerage, invented properties, invented deals. Every mainstream sales system ships the same deal object: one name, one amount, one stage, one owner, one close date, attached to one account. It was designed for a software sale, one rep working one buyer to one price, and it is a good model for that. Apply it to a brokerage and it breaks at once, because a lease or a sale has two sides.
A landlord side and a tenant side, a seller and a buyer. Your firm may represent one or both. When it represents both, two brokers in the same firm are working the same deal from opposite ends, with different clients, different activity and different fee arrangements. The record has one owner field. So the second broker becomes a note, or a second deal with the same property and half the story, and every report built on it, pipeline by broker, commission by side, is built on a record that cannot be right.
Here is the model that fits. The deal is one record, and its sides are records of their own, attached to it: a listing side and a procuring side, each with its client, its broker, its share of the fee and its source. A two-sided deal is one record with both ends. A one-sided deal is the same record with an outside broker on the other end, as a side, not as a note. In Zoho CRM that is the deal plus a small related module for the sides, two rows per deal, each looking up its broker and its client.
It takes an afternoon to build, and it is the decision everything else in this video depends on, because once the sides exist, each side can have its own stage. The default stages are qualification, proposal, negotiation, closed. A lease moves through tour, proposal, letter of intent, lease draft, execution, commencement; a sale through offer, contract, due diligence, closing. And the two sides are not at the same stage: the landlord side is negotiating with three prospects while each prospect's side sits at a different point. One stage per deal cannot show a listing with three live procuring sides.
A stage per side can. The stage is also where the firm's rules belong. No letter of intent leaves without the approved template. No side reaches execution without the signed agreement on file. No commission is computed before the lease is executed and dated. In a generic pipeline those rules are training. On a stage per side they are a process rule the system enforces, which is what Blueprint in Zoho CRM is for, and it is why we put signature inside the sales system rather than beside it. In a software sale the account persists and the deal is transient.
In a brokerage the persistent thing is the property. It gets leased, the tenant leaves, it gets leased again, it sells, the new owner leases it: five deals over ten years, one building. The tenant of one deal is the prospect of the next; the landlord is a client on the listing side today and a buyer next year. A generic system forces the property into the account slot, or into the listing platform where the sales system cannot see it, and the history that makes a broker valuable, who has been in this building and when they come off lease, is spread across systems and memory.
Make the property its own record, hang the deals off it, and let the parties change roles across deals. The listing data then lives once: the marketing platform reads the property from the sales system, or the other way, but nobody keys it twice. Now ask the question again. Where is the Harbor Street lease? One screen: the property, the deal, the listing side at lease draft, the procuring side at letter of intent, the counter from Friday logged as the last activity on that side, the draft lease attached to the deal with its version, the signature not yet sent, the expected fee by side and instalment on the record from the day it was created, and no invoice, because the stage gate says not yet.
Seven tools, one record. The answer is a read, not a reconstruction, and it is right because the sides, the stages and the property were modelled before anyone was asked to adopt anything. The money that follows the close, who is owed what and when, is on the deal as lines, which is the subject of our commission video. This is the piece before it: knowing where the deal is while it is still a deal. A deal with two sides, a stage per side with the rules on it, a property that outlives the deal, and the documents attached to the record.
Model those four and where is this deal becomes the easiest question in the office. Leave them out and no amount of training will make brokers describe a two-sided, property-centred, plan-priced deal in a form built for a one-sided software sale. We are CodeStringers, a Zoho authorised consulting partner, and we build this model for brokerages on the sales system they already run. Discovery is no-risk: we model one of your deals both ways and show the difference. The links are below.
We design, build, integrate and operate AI-driven, platform-agnostic integrated business solutions for operationally complex companies. Start with a conversation; we will tell you if we are a fit.
