Proposal for Farbman Group / BraceYourself Solutions

Anchor project

02Make Farbman the voice
of the Chicago market.

John mentioned Youssef has been thinking about AI-driven marketing for Chicago construction. I haven't talked with Youssef directly, so treat this as me riffing on a secondhand prompt rather than a brief from him. One version of that engagement, built out: a system that doesn't just publish content, but produces genuine market intelligence at scale. Here's what that could look like.

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.

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.

The goal of the build: within six months of running, when a Chicago tenant asks who actually understands this market, Farbman is one of the first names that surfaces — because the searchable archive of original Chicago analysis exists, and nobody else in the market is producing it at that cadence.

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.

A digital agency or consultancy would typically quote 8 to 12 weeks and $60K to $120K for a comparable scope.⁵ 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 larger fixed-fee build (typically $28K–$75K, depending on category). 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

The big-firm “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, May 2026) plus typical 1.35× loaded multiplier (employer-side benefits, payroll tax, equipment). B: VTS published list pricing (vts.com, accessed May 2026) and analyst commentary on mid-market Dealpath / Procore tier ranges (G2 and Software Advice, 2025–2026 reviews). C: range constructed from public engagement disclosures across BCG X, Deloitte AI & Data, and boutique AI consultancies, pilot through enterprise transformation; not a single sourced index. Andy: every figure on this page is a reference point, not a Farbman-specific quote.

Market Intelligence and Lead Generation

Builds in this category: $32K to $65K, fixed fee

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. If your team is currently paying a marketing agency a six-figure annual retainer for branded content with no measurable pipeline attribution, that's the apples-to-apples comparison.¹

Listing microsites and OM generator

Auto-generated property landing pages and branded PDF offering memoranda. OMs typically take a broker or coordinator 10–20 hours each.² If your team produces them at any volume, the time reclaimed compounds. Plus you upgrade the polish and capture inbound on every listing with a real microsite instead of a PDF on Dropbox.

Deal Operations and Internal AI

Builds in this category: $35K to $75K, fixed fee

CRE-native CRM and deal pipeline

Stages built for LOI → PSA → DD → close, with voice-note-to-record and automated follow-up. Mid-market CRE deal-management platforms (Dealpath, Rethink CRM, etc.) typically run in the tens of thousands per year per seat tier,³ and you never own the data model. This is custom-fit, yours, and paid once.

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. The math: at a fully-loaded internal hourly rate around $75 and one hour saved per person per week, a team of 25–30 clears a $50K build inside a quarter.

Lease abstraction pipeline

AI extracts rent, escalations, options, TI allowances, and every clause you care about from lease PDFs into structured data. Outsourced abstraction typically runs $300–$500 per lease.⁴ If your team processes leases at meaningful volume — break-even is somewhere around 100 leases a year on a $40K build — the pipeline pays for itself inside twelve months and compounds in value every year after.

Property, Tenant, and Investor Systems

Builds in this category: $28K to $60K, fixed fee

Tenant portal and renewal automation

Maintenance requests, lease docs, announcements, and automated renewal sequences triggered 12 months out. Even a single-digit-percent lift on renewal rate across a meaningful portfolio recurs indefinitely and dwarfs the build cost in the first year. Plus the leasing team stops answering the same three questions by email.

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.

Integrations and Automation

$5K to $15K per build, scoped individually

Smaller integrations and automations

Meeting-transcript-to-CRM bridges, email workflows in your stack of choice, one-off scripts that kill a recurring frustration. Integrates with whatever you already run on — Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Yardi, MRI, the rest. 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.

Ongoing operation

Ongoing operation and 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.

Sources & references

CRE marketing agency retainer ranges: industry survey aggregations from Buildout, RealNex, and PropertyMetrics (2024–2025) place mid-market CRE marketing retainers in the $80K–$200K/yr range when a dedicated content/SEO/paid-search scope is included. Substitute your incumbent's actual annual spend.
OM production time: NAIOP and SIOR practitioner surveys (2023–2024) place full-cycle OM authoring at 10–25 hours per package depending on asset complexity. Internal estimates may vary — calibrate against your team's recent files.
Mid-market CRE deal-management platform pricing: Dealpath, Rethink CRM, and Pereview list-priced and analyst-cited tier ranges (G2 Crowd 2025, Software Advice 2025). Per-seat tier pricing scales meaningfully with module count and user count; published ranges typically span the low tens of thousands per year on a baseline tier.
Lease abstraction outsourcing rates: Leverton, LeaseAccelerator, and Visual Lease published 2024 rate cards plus boutique-firm anecdote pricing place per-lease abstraction in the $300–$500 range for full-clause extraction.
Comparable-scope agency engagement quotes: Clutch.co aggregated proposals across 2024–2025 for small-to-mid-tier custom build engagements (8–12 wk, web app + integration scope) cluster in the $60K–$120K band. Substitute any quote your team has actually received.

01Why this isn't another AI pitch.

02Make Farbman the voice
of the Chicago market.

03What else I can build.

04Priced against the problem.

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

05How I work.

06A scoping call.

01Why this isn't another AI pitch.

02Make Farbman the voiceof the Chicago market.

03What else I can build.

04Priced against the problem.

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

05How I work.

06A scoping call.

02Make Farbman the voice
of the Chicago market.

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