How to Find the Right CRE Contacts for Every Asset Class
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Commercial real estate is not one market. It is a massive market made up of at least two dozen smaller markets, each with its own owners, buying patterns and pace of activity. A contact list built on the idea of "CRE companies" treats a multifamily operator in Phoenix and a data center developer in West Texas as the same prospect. They are not. They buy different things, on different timelines, from different people.
That is where generic prospecting breaks down. You pull a broad list, send the same message to everyone on it, and most of it reaches people with no authority to buy what you sell or no active project to spend on. The reply rate shows it.
Targeting by asset class closes that gap. Once you know how ownership is structured in a given asset class, who controls the budget for services and materials, and where activity is actually concentrated, you reach people with a reason to answer.
Biscred recognizes 24 commercial real estate asset classes. We’ve selected eight to illustrate the difference among them: multifamily, industrial, office, healthcare, hospitality, retail, data centers and mixed use.
Multifamily
The multifamily asset class represents the largest portion of the CRE pie, and one of the most actively traded. Multihousing News estimates multifamily CRE made up nearly 35% of total CRE market share in 2025. Clarion Partners reported that multifamily represented almost 21% of the investable CRE heading into 2026.
Who governs decision-making power over multifamily CRE properties? For providers of services and materials, sort the players before you build a list.
Owners and asset managers control capital budgets for renovations and larger projects.
Operators and their property management teams control day-to-day spending on turns, repairs, landscaping, cleaning and supplies.
Developers matter for new construction, but when the pipeline is thin, the active money sits with operators of stabilized properties.
In Biscred, that maps to the property management and operations / facilities functional areas for recurring work, and asset management for capital projects.
When we apply these filters to the Biscred database:
Company asset experience = multifamily
People functional areas = asset management, operations/facilities and property management
We find 41,780 companies and 352,290 people.*
Industrial
Industrial CRE encompasses 22 types of properties, including several types of manufacturing facilities, warehouses, industrial parks, and refineries. Industrial owners range from large institutional REITs and funds with centralized procurement to numerous regional owner-operators who are easier to reach. Match the target to the work:
People functional areas = asset management, operations / facilities, construction / development
Asset class = industrial
Using those parameters in Biscred, we find 46,860 companies and 552,585 people.
Office
Office CRE is really two markets, and they are moving in opposite directions. Prime and Class A buildings in strong locations hold tenants, command rising rents and draw the bulk of leasing. Obsolete space sits empty with no clear path back. For a service provider, that split can be the first decision about where to focus. Your prospects are concentrated in two places: owners repositioning quality buildings with renovations and amenity upgrades, and the conversion of outdated offices into other uses. The half-empty commodity building with no plan is where outreach goes to die.
Separate the ownership layer from the property management layer.
For repositioning, renovations, amenity buildouts and conversions: Target owners, asset managers and the construction / development function.
For ongoing building services, target property managers. The signal to look for is an owner actively investing in a prime asset or converting an obsolete one.
Applying ownership-related filters in Biscred:
Industries = operator, private equity, real estate investment firms, and REITs
Asset class = office
We find 11,776 companies and 305,818 people who specialize in office CRE.
Next, we apply filters to target ongoing building services:
Industries = property management
Asset experience = office
And, we find 9,352 companies and 157,000 people who specialize in office CRE in the Biscred database.
Healthcare / Medical Office
Healthcare real estate does not swing with the cycle the way other sectors do. It keeps building at a steady pace, driven by an aging population that needs more care every year. For a service provider, that means a dependable stream of work rather than a boom-and-bust one.
Most of the growth is in decentralized care. Health systems are moving services out of the hospital and closer to where patients live, opening medical office buildings, ambulatory surgery centers and urgent care, and converting old retail and office space into medical use. That is a steady pipeline of both ground-up and fit-out work.
Who buys varies more here than in most asset classes, so sort the players before you build a list.
Specialist developers and health system real estate and facilities teams drive new-build and fit-out vendor selection.
REITs own many of the buildings, but the provider operating the space often controls the fit-out.
Physician groups and private equity platforms are active buyers too.
Consolidation is putting more sites under fewer, larger owners, so one relationship can carry real weight. Target construction / development and facilities leads for build and fit-out, and property management for ongoing services.
Industries = property management, construction / development
Asset experience = healthcare
A Biscred search with those filters produces 30,286 companies and 327,626 people who operate in healthcare CRE.
Hospitality
Hospitality has an ownership structure that can trip up outreach because of its unique stakeholder design. A single hotel often involves three separate parties: the owner who holds the real estate, the brand it franchises, and a third-party management company that runs day-to-day operations. Put the wrong one on your list and your pitch never reaches a budget.
That structure decides who buys, so sort the players before you build a list:
The brand rarely purchases your services.
For operational goods and services, the management company running the property makes the call.
For capital work and brand-mandated property improvement plans, the owner controls the budget.
Build two kinds of lists, ownership groups and third-party management companies such as Aimbridge, HHM and Hotel Equities, and aim each pitch at the right one. Because hospitality ownership is fragmented across many mid-size and independent owners, those owners are often more reachable than the big brands or national management companies.
To reach the operational buyers in Biscred:
Industries = property management, operator
Asset experience = hospitality
We find 9,248 companies and 279,355 people.
Retail
Which retail is worth prospecting depends entirely on format (see “13 Types of Retail Properties”). Grocery-anchored centers, neighborhood and strip centers, necessity and medical retail, discount and off-price, and experiential formats tend to perform well. Class B and C malls and mid-tier power centers with weak anchors do not.
On ownership, the practical divide is REIT versus mid-size private. The largest grocery-anchored and shopping mall portfolios sit with REITs like Kimco, Regency, Brixmor, Simon and Federal Realty, which tend to run centralized procurement that can be difficult to break into. A large share of strip and neighborhood centers is held by regional developers and private owners who are more numerous and more accessible.
In Biscred:
Industries = operator, private equity, real estate investment firms, REITs, property management
Asset experience = retail
We find 18,565 companies and 366,346 people.
Data Centers
Data center real estate is one of the busiest construction stories in commercial real estate, and if you have not sold into the space before, the opportunity is worth spelling out.
Demand from cloud and AI has set off a building boom on a scale the sector has never seen. Power, not money, is the constraint, since grid connections can take years, so on-site and behind-the-meter generation is expanding alongside the buildings. Activity is spreading into secondary and rural markets that have land and power. For a service provider the demand is concrete: electrical, mechanical, cooling, structural, security, fiber and fit-out.
Who you target depends on what you sell.
If you build or equip, go after the developers, design firms and construction and general contracting firms delivering these projects, along with colocation operators.
If you provide ongoing services, target the operators, meaning the hyperscalers and colocation providers.
Vendors in power and cooling should also track the utilities and on-site power developers attached to these deals.
In Biscred:
Industries = construction / development, operator
Asset experience = data center
We find 3,394 companies and 200,982 people.
Mixed-Use
For a service provider, mixed-use is the asset class that buys the most, since one project stacks several property types together and each brings its own systems to build and maintain. Mixed-use CRE gets built in two shapes: (1) suburban horizontal projects, including B and C malls redeveloped into apartments, retail and office, and (2) urban vertical buildings that stack uses in one structure. Newer live-work-play districts often fold in medical, wellness and hospitality space. The prospecting point is complexity. One mixed-use project holds several asset types at once, so it needs more vendors and service categories than a single-use building, with residential, retail, office and sometimes hotel systems under one roof to coordinate.
Where you find an open door depends on your offer.
At the development stage, the developer — often a mixed-use specialist — and the general contractor and design team make most vendor calls about services and materials, given the construction complexity.
Once a property is up and running, the owner or property manager handles ongoing services, sometimes split by component.
Target developers for the build and property management for the operating asset.
In Biscred:
Industries = developer, property management
Asset experience = mixed use
We find 9,497 companies and 245,604 people.
Other Asset Classes
Biscred recognizes 24 asset classes in total. We selected the eight listed here to represent the more active and niche asset classes, and to illustrate how Biscred’s database can target the right decision-makers. These examples just scratch the surface. Additional filters can be applied based on location, company size, functional areas and more. The same method works for the remaining 16: affordable housing, aviation, communication, education, energy, entertainment facilities, government, infrastructure, land, life sciences, parking, railroad, self storage, senior living, student housing and sustainable energy. For any of them, the method is the same three steps: figure out how ownership is structured, find who controls the budget for what you sell, and check where activity is concentrated before you build a list.
Building Your Lists
Assembling these lists by hand is slow. Biscred is a CRE prospecting platform that filters companies and contacts by asset class, geography, industry, seniority and company size across 647,000+ CRE companies and 5.8 million professionals,* so you can go straight to a target like asset managers at multifamily owners in the Southeast or facilities leads at data center operators. It also covers the functional areas that map to purchasing authority, including construction / development, asset management, operations / facilities and property management.
*Numbers as of June 30, 2026. Biscred continuously updates its database. Numbers reported throughout our website represent a snapshot in time.