Maybe I need to be talked out of this - but all roads keep leading me back to building our our solution. For context, we have built custom internal tools/platforms over the past several years, (automated showing scheduling, lease template + Make RPA for rent roll entry into our ERP, Work order management with field service/inventory/tenant comms, After hours Ai agent with n8n routing etc) so I do have access to a small dev team, QA etc.(but they don't have CRM experience - so that's an issue) I'm trying to talk myself out of this build as I know it's probably a beast to undertake, but I just can't find the right solution to our use case. At the moment we're using Follow-up boss (FUB) - reason was a strong mobile app for our rental agents in the field, real estate based. The mobile app has had issues lagging, poor ability to search contacts by tags/type. Fine for searching by name or phone number, but when you have 1,500 leads in a 3 month span - how would this even work? It didn't, we had to change their last names to the tags we wanted to search. We also have a custom scheduling platform we built that the rental agent selects their properties they want to show (similar to Google Cal) the next day and notice goes out to all tenants. This transaction lives outside the CRM so we could't track showings for that lead unless manually entered by the agent back into the CRM, well that turned out to be an administrative nightmare. So we lost visibility on which leads saw what properties & when.

Then if the lead wanted to rent, the agent would need to manually move them to a different stage and again, visibility would be lost as we moved to our lease template builder, which again sits in
another siloed platform we built with API to Pandadoc. Again this lead would need to manually be pushed through each stage from Lead to Lease. If this was forgotten, well you know how this starts to look. Our company pushes a decent leasing volume in a 4-5 mnth timeframe (peak season)

So my thought was to even create a basic CRM, remove the bloat, we use like 30% of FUB features. Then link leads to showings > follow-up > application submitted > deposit
> lease signed etc with full visibility along the way. We have an ultra clear view of what we need to do at each step and it's quite difficult to find a platform that will accomplish this.

The other layer was an Ai native first approach - I feel this is where the gap in the market sits (or
maybe just from the ones I've seen). It would be great to mine data about your leads in natural language. For eg. "all 3 bed leads looking for Downtown" and the platform could surface all of these active leads for you - not something buried behind smartlists & filters. At the moment in FUB we have to use smart lists, and like they say "garbage in, garbage out" - these lists got messy very quickly, we spent more time trying to make sure these leads were sanitized and up to date then it was worth. A lead would email they wanted a 3 bed, Downtown with 2 parking spots, and each one of these data points would need to be entered as a separate tag - but tags were not searchable in FUB. So they we have to place this lead in smart lists, but now we have 20 smart lists for all of the variations... etc etc

Anyway if you made it this far I appreciate the time you took to read this. Not sure if I need to be talked out of attempting to build something like this or is it worth to effort?