The short answer
Relationships still close most commercial real estate deals, but they are a slow way to find new ones. Many projects leave a public record before anyone markets them: a building permit, a sale, a loan. Outreach that starts from that record reaches fewer people, and better-matched ones. Data from one LinkedIn campaign shows the same from the other end: a request that shows you did your homework gets accepted far more often than a compliment does, and so does a request with no note at all.
Two ways to find the next deal
Joshua Freedman, founder of the tokenized real estate platform SecondaryDAO, calls it the relationship guy against the signal guy (The Relationship Guy Is Losing to the Signal Guy, Medium, April 2026). He wrote it after comparing notes with David Poberezhnyi, founder of Buildwise: Joshua was testing the outreach side, Buildwise was building the signal side.
In the first lane, a deal reaches the people who are already part of the conversation: the brokers, lenders and sponsors who know each other. It works, and most deals still close that way. But a property nobody markets stays invisible to everyone outside that circle.
In the second lane, you start from the record a project leaves, work out who it matters to, and reach those people directly. The relationship still matters. It comes in at the end, to close.
Projects leave a trail
A new building needs a permit. A sale is recorded as a deed, and a loan as a mortgage. Each names a property and an owner, and each sits in a different city, county or state system, in its own format. Following the trail is the hard part. Our guide to finding the developer behind a property LLC shows one piece of it.
What a live campaign shows
Joshua sent 105 LinkedIn connection requests to family offices, institutional allocators, property owners and other real estate investors, in five versions, and published the results. 58% were accepted overall. What the request said made the biggest difference:
- Leading with research on the person’s portfolio: 80% accepted.
- Asking a direct question: 67%.
- Leading with the offer to investors: 62%.
- A blank request: 55%.
- A compliment about their work: 29%.
A blank request did almost twice as well as a compliment. People have seen the template compliment too often, and a blank request makes no claim it can’t back up.
Three more findings from the same campaign:
- People take their time. The median person accepted after 20 hours, the average after 74. Requests more than two weeks old were still accepted 51% of the time, so pulling them back early throws away acceptances that were on their way.
- Instant accepts are often not people. Requests accepted within a minute stood apart from everyone else. They look like automation, and they add nothing to a pipeline.
- LinkedIn pushes back on automated senders. In a separate InMail run, 45% of attempts found no message button and 8.5% timed out.
What it means for your outreach
Fewer, better-matched messages win twice: more of them are accepted, and they draw less attention from the platform. That only works if you know who to write to before you write. A filter for company size and job title can’t tell you who just filed a permit for a renovation or bought a building. That information lives outside LinkedIn, so the outreach has to start from it.
Joshua lays the flow out in five steps: capture the signal, match it to people, sequence the outreach, filter the responses, and hand real conversations to a person. Most teams start at the sequencing, and that is where it breaks: without the signal, there is nothing specific to say.
How Buildwise does this
Buildwise runs the same flow in seven steps. We find relevant projects in building permits, real estate news and contract awards, identify the company behind each one, check it against your criteria, find the right people and write to them about their project. You approve the messages and a sample of the companies first.
Connection requests go out with no note; after someone accepts, the message leads with their project. Outreach runs from your own accounts, split between them, and after a reply no one else from your team approaches that company. Your team takes it from there. See our services.
The bottom line
Most deals still close through relationships. They are no longer the best way to find the next one. Start from the record a project leaves, write to the few people it concerns, and let the relationship do the closing.
