Proposal · April 2026
An operator,
not a vendor.

What BraceYourself Solutions can build for Farbman Group.

From Ethan Brace, BraceYourself Solutions

01Why this isn't another AI pitch.

You've already been told that AI is the future of commercial real estate. You've been pitched the workshops, the internal enablement programs, the "we'll teach your team to build agents" playbook. It's the dominant sales motion right now because it sounds like empowerment.

Here's what actually happens. A firm signs a six-figure engagement. Training decks get built. Two or three demos ship. Then the people who took the workshops go back to the day jobs they had before, the demos don't get iterated on, the prompts stop getting tuned, and nine months later the AI stack looks like an abandoned Slack channel.

The missing piece isn't knowledge. It's an operator.

I built the Legacy Map platform and the John-bot agent you just saw. John didn't learn to code. He didn't hire a team. He described what he needed, I shipped it, and I keep shipping. That's the model. Farbman doesn't need to become an AI company. You need someone who already is one, embedded in your problems.

"You don't need to become an AI company. You need an operator who already is one."

The offer on the table

Anchor project

02Make Farbman the voice
of the Chicago market.

Youssef's interest in AI-driven marketing for Chicago points to something specific: a system that doesn't just publish content, but produces genuine market intelligence at scale. Here's what that looks like built.

i.
Daily ingestion Chicago CRE news, permit filings, major project announcements, tenant moves, and live market data, pulled automatically, every morning.
ii.
Original insight drafts Claude drafts editorial pieces from the data, like "What the new Fulton Market tower means for tenant rates." Not regurgitated headlines. Actual market POV in Farbman's voice.
iii.
Farbman-Chicago branded microsite Auto-published to a dedicated property, building a searchable archive of Farbman's Chicago intelligence over time.
iv.
Multi-channel fan-out LinkedIn, segmented email lists, and paid creative pull from the same content spine. One editorial calendar drives everything.
v.
CRM capture and follow-up sequences Readers convert to tiered contacts. Automated sequences handle follow-up based on what they read and how they engage.
vi.
Monthly scoreboard Pieces published, reach, qualified leads, meetings booked. Not vanity metrics. Actual pipeline attribution.

"Within six months, when a Chicago tenant asks 'who actually understands this market?' Farbman is the answer that shows up first."

Build phase: 6–10 weeks  ·  Ongoing operation priced separately, monthly

04Priced against the problem.

Every number below is set against a specific cost you’re already paying: lost deals, manual labor, enterprise license fees, missed renewals. The math should feel obvious. If a line item ever makes you hesitate, we scope it down until it doesn’t.

Start small

Prove it in a week.
One sprint, one deliverable.

Pick any one capability from the menu in Section 03. I scope it to something shippable in five days, build it, hand it over. You own the deliverable outright, whether we continue or not.

An agency would quote 8 to 12 weeks and $60K to $120K for work in the same category. The compression comes from one operator running modern AI tooling with no handoffs, no coordination overhead, no account manager layers. That's not a promotional rate. It's what one focused builder replaces a team with.

For Farbman, the sprint means you can feel the working relationship and see shipped output before committing to a $65K build. One week, one concrete thing in your hands, then you decide.

$9K
Fixed, all in
1 wk
Start to delivery
You own it.
No strings on the output

You already have three options for every one of the problems below. This proposal exists because the fourth, me, puts more of the spend on the built thing itself and less on org overhead, licensing, and retainers.

Option A
Hire for it
$180K – $260K/ yr, loaded
Senior AI engineer in the Detroit market, loaded. Six months to hire, six more to ship. You absorb the ramp-up regardless.
Option B
Enterprise SaaS
$20K – $150K/ yr, per platform
VTS, Dealpath, Procore. Good tools that never quite fit your workflow. Licenses recur and the data model isn’t yours.
Option C
AI consultancy
$40K – $500K/ engagement
Accenture, Slalom, the “train your team” pitch. Premium rates, bureaucratic delivery. Decks, a pilot or two, no operator afterward.
Option D
What I build
Fixed-price/ once, owned
You own the code, the data, and the roadmap. Every build below is priced so one month of the pain it removes covers it. Past that, pure margin.

Reference ranges. A: Detroit senior AI engineer base ($125K–$190K, Ziprecruiter / Levels.fyi) plus typical 1.35× loaded multiplier. B: published VTS rate ($20K/yr) and mid-market Dealpath / Procore anecdotes. C: 2026 AI consulting engagement benchmarks across pilot, mid-market, and enterprise transformation scopes.

Chicago Market Intelligence Engine
Daily content pipeline, branded microsite, LinkedIn and email fan-out, CRM capture. A single brokerage commission on one meaningful Chicago tenant acquired through this channel covers the build many times over. The CRE firms spending $150K+/yr on ad agencies and getting nothing measurable in return are the comparison point.
$65,000
Farbman GPT · private internal assistant
Every broker, analyst, and coordinator runs the same queries on repeat. Comps on this deal, pricing on the last one like it, where’s the SOP. A private assistant trained on your archive answers in seconds. Across a 30-person team, one hour saved per person per week clears the investment inside a quarter.
$55,000
CRE-native CRM & deal pipeline
Stages built for LOI → PSA → DD → close, with voice-note-to-record and automated follow-up. Dealpath licenses run $60K–$150K per year for a firm your size, and you never own the data model. This is custom-fit, yours, and paid once.
$75,000
Tenant portal & renewal automation
Maintenance requests, lease docs, announcements, and automated renewal sequences triggered 12 months out. A one-percent lift on renewal rate across a portfolio your size pays for this in the first year and recurs indefinitely. Plus the leasing team stops answering the same three questions by email.
$60,000
Lease abstraction pipeline
AI extracts rent, escalations, options, TI allowances, and every clause you care about from lease PDFs into structured data. Outsourced abstraction runs $300–$500 per lease. If you process 100+ leases a year, the pipeline pays for itself inside twelve months and compounds in value every year after.
$35,000
Listing microsites & OM generator
Auto-generated property landing pages and branded PDF offering memoranda. OMs currently take a broker or coordinator 10–20 hours each; you ship hundreds a year. Reclaim that time, upgrade the polish, capture inbound on every listing with a real microsite instead of a PDF on Dropbox.
$32,000
Automated investor reporting
Branded quarterly IRR, NOI, and occupancy reports pulled from live data. Per-deal investor microsites with documents and updates. Asset management teams typically spend 30–50 hours per quarter manually producing these. The capital-raise posture upgrade is worth more than the time saved.
$28,000
Smaller integrations & automations
Fathom-to-CRM, meeting-to-action pipelines, Gmail workflows, one-off scripts that kill a recurring frustration. Scoped per request. The unit economics are the same for every one of these: if it saves a person four hours a month, it pays for itself that month.
$5K–$15K
Ongoing operation & tuning
Per system, monthly. The thing that kills most enterprise AI is the absence of an operator after launch. This is me keeping your systems working, tuned, and adapted to new data. Not a support contract with a queue.
from $4K / mo

Every price is anchored to a specific problem. We confirm scope and final number in the scoping call.

05How I work.

Week 1–2
Discovery I sit in your seats. Understand the deal flow, the tools, the friction, before touching a line of code.
Week 3–6
First working prototype A real system, small scope, your actual data. Not a mockup. Not a deck. A thing that runs.
Ongoing
Two-week ship cycles Nothing stays theoretical for long. Each cycle has a defined scope and a working deliverable.

No training curriculum to buy. No internal "AI team" to staff. You describe the problem; I ship the fix.

06A scoping call.

45 minutes. I walk through Farbman's actual operation with you: leasing, brokerage, property ops, the Chicago play, whatever's loudest. Then we find the first three things worth building. No commitment. If it's a fit, we scope the anchor project. If it's not, you've gotten a sharp second opinion from someone who ships.

Ethan Brace
BraceYourself Solutions