We Built the Tools That Could Only See Half the Deal

Twenty years ago, the real estate group at a major specialty retailer ran on a junk drawer.

Not a metaphorical one. Excel workbooks with names like `proforma-v3-FINAL-actual.xlsx`. An Access database exactly one person understood. Lotus Notes archives. PDFs of executed leases nobody could find at 4:45 on a Friday. And email, always email, holding the whole thing together across roughly sixty business partners.

So we built our way out of it. A data-driven app for location notes and activities, so the field team's site visits didn't evaporate into someone's inbox. A map app that showed every location summarized geographically, so leadership could see the portfolio instead of reading about it. These tools were good. People used them. They made the work faster and the records more trustworthy.

And they had one fatal limit. They could only ever see our side of the deal.

A retail real estate deal is not executed by a company. It's executed by a coalition: a broker who works for a brokerage, a landlord who works for an ownership group, a general contractor, an architect, a franchisee, sometimes a municipality. None of them share your employer. None of them share your email domain. And none of them were ever going to log into the tools we built.

So the pattern repeated on every deal. Our systems held our half beautifully. The other half (the landlord's counter on the TI allowance, the broker's updated LOI, the GC's revised delivery date) arrived as an attachment, got forwarded twice, and settled into someone's inbox where it quietly went stale. The tool ended at the company wall. The deal didn't.

You already know how this feels. The site committee approves a location on Tuesday. On Thursday the landlord's broker mentions, almost in passing, that the anchor tenant everyone assumed was signed is actually still in negotiation. That fact existed the whole time. It just lived on the other side of the wall.

That's the insight it took us two decades to name plainly: a deal team is not a company. It's a coalition.

And once you see it that way, the persistence of email stops looking like laziness. Email survives because it's the only tool everyone in the coalition already has. The broker isn't going to adopt your platform. The landlord's asset manager isn't either. So the deal falls to the lowest common denominator that spans all of them: a thread with eleven people on it and three versions of the same PDF.

Every tool we'd built assumed a single organization. Every tool most people build still does. That assumption is the whole problem. You can buy the best single-company system in the category and your deals will still run on email, because your deals were never single-company to begin with.

MYDealTeams is the correction. It's the shared workspace for the entire deal team, not just your side of it, with structured site evaluation built in.

The people outside your company wall aren't guests you email PDFs to. They're members, scoped by trust level, working from the same record you are. The landlord's updated terms don't get forwarded; they land where the deal lives. The site evaluation isn't a spreadsheet someone rebuilds from memory six months later; it's weighted scoring, a financial model, a documented risk register, and a sequential approval trail that survives the person who ran it.

We're not claiming this is easy or that we've reinvented anything. We're claiming something narrower and more honest: we spent twenty years watching deals die in email threads, we built the tools that could only see half the deal, and we finally built the one that can see all of it.

We're reintroducing MYDealTeams during a stretch where this matters more, not less. Store openings are rising and closings are slowing for the first time since the pandemic. The expansion cycle is turning back on. That means more deals, more coalitions, and more of them coordinating across companies that will never share a system, unless the system is built for exactly that.

If you run retail real estate deals and you're tired of finding out about the other half of the deal a week too late, that's the entire reason we exist.

MYDealTeams is free right now during Early Access: Community is free, Pro is $69/month, and everything is free while we're in Early Access. You have nothing to lose and a deal team to organize.