BuildCo found 3 new sites and 25 tenant leads in its first month.

About BuildCo

BuildCo is a real estate developer focused on grocery-anchored retail. It needs to know where tenants plan to expand, both to choose new sites and to fill vacant units in its existing developments.

The challenge

BuildCo grows in two ways: it fills vacant units in its plazas, and it finds new sites to develop. Both depend on knowing which retailers are expanding, and where, before other landlords do.

Retailers reveal those plans across hundreds of sources: news articles, broker listings, investor filings and their own websites. BuildCo paid for legacy software to track them, but it was an expensive, generic feed built for every developer. Most of its alerts did not fit BuildCo's markets or units, and it missed signals that mattered. The team still had to read every alert, check it, and match it to its sites by hand.

What we built

• Tenant database

  A self-updating database of thousands of retailers with their store locations, target markets, site criteria and leasing contacts.

• AI agents

  AI agents that monitor tenant websites, broker listings, investor filings and the news, and log every new expansion signal.

• Custom app

  A private web app that gives the team a live view of every tenant and expansion signal in one place.

• MCP server

  A secure connection to Claude and ChatGPT, so the team can ask the database anything in plain English and get sourced answers.

Results

In its first month, the system surfaced 235 expansion signals that the team could search and query. From them, BuildCo added 3 potential sites in new markets to its pipeline and found 25 tenant leads to fill its existing developments.