If like me you work in commercial real estate acquisitions, site selection, or land development you've looked at hundreds, maybe thousands, of properties over your career. Not physically "looked at" - some are visited on site tours, some are in emailed flyers, some are listings or saved searches on CoStar, LoopNet, Crexi, or whatnot. The point is we "look at" lots of properties. Most of them are passed on, some of them you barely remember. But a few of them are either immediately of interest, or something you want to follow up on at some point in the future.
That is the nature of our business.
The challenge for me is a problem that nobody has solved well: How can I easily save those that I want to follow up on, and how can I quickly share the properties I am interested in with my team?
For me the specific frustrations were four things:
Storing: I needed a single place to save every property I looked at with enough detail to be useful later. Not just an address. Contacts, notes, files, URLs, zoning info, price, broker, owner, APN, coordinates. Everything attached to the property record in one place.
Categorizing: I work on multiple projects simultaneously, often with different tenants or different project types. A single property might be relevant to three different projects and I need a way to assign properties to specific projects or tenants without duplicating property details across multiple spreadsheets. Anyone who has managed acquisition pipelines knows exactly how complicated it becomes trying to coordinate updates across multiple spreadsheets.
Searching: This one matters more than people realize once they've been doing this for a few years. Often times I need to find a property I entered six months or two years ago based on whatever fragment I could remember - owner name, broker, city, zoning, a keyword from my notes, a price range, or any combination of those. The ability to search across hundreds of properties by who, what, when, where, and why is not a nice-to-have, it's the difference between valuable institutional knowledge and a folder full of forgotten spreadsheets.
Mapping: I want the ability to generate a map of all properties owned by a specific company, offered by a specific broker, or relevant to a specific project, depending on what I am searching for, and not have to export the data and import it into a Google map. Properties should display on the map as pins when zoomed out and parcel boundaries when zoomed in without having to create multiple map layers or duplicate data. Occasionally the only thing I can remember about a property is where it is located. Being able to zoom to specific location on the map to find the property is sometimes the only way I can track it down.
To solve these problems I looked at many tools: property ownership apps, project management tools, and CRMs. None of them did the trick. Ownership apps like LandVision or LandGlide are excellent for ownership research but have no easy way to save and share what you find. Project management tools like Asana or DealForce require so much data entry per record that tracking hundreds of properties becomes a part-time job. CRMs like Salesforce are contact-centric when acquisition work is fundamentally property-centric, and the real estate add-ons are expensive, complex, and still fall short on mapping and ease of use.
None of them did what I needed.
So, around 2022 I started building something that did, which became the precursor to Pics & Parcels.
It was built nights and weekends over about a year before it was functional, while I continued to acquire and develop properties during the day. The functionality is there, it works the way I want it to. I have been using it every day since it went ‘online’, updating it and adding features along the way. The UI still needs polish. But the core of the app - storing, categorizing, searching, and mapping properties at volume - works exactly as I need it to.
Just so you understand my background: before real estate I worked in enterprise software development - accounting systems, distribution systems, geographic and GIS-based market analysis applications. For P&P I wrote every line of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL in the platform. This is not a vibe-coded weekend project. I even had to update the entire mapping functionality when Microsoft replaced Bing Maps with Azure Maps, ugh. It is an application built by someone who understands both the technical requirements of the software and the daily workflow of the job.
I currently have over 3,000 properties in the app and have used it to source more than 100 development projects since I started using it. The mobile layer - GPS photo capture, automatic sign reading, field capture from your phone - is in development now and will complete the workflow from field to desk in one tool.
One important clarification: P&P is not meant to replace a full project management platform. Once a property moves into active development I use Smartsheet to handle the heavy lifting of contract timelines, due diligence, permits and approvals, engineering drawings, scheduling, and team coordination. That level of detail and workflow complexity is exactly what project management tools are built for. What I needed was the layer that comes before that - tracking and categorizing properties at volume during the site selection and acquisition phase, before a deal is even under contract. That gap is what P&P is meant to fill, and for me it has been doing exactly that.
Let me know if any of the frustrations I described sound familiar to you, Pics & Parcels was built for that.
If you want more information or want to sign up for pre-release early access, visit the link below.
Thanks.
https://picsandparcels.com
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