Commercial real estate still relies on an unusual amount of waiting.
Developers wait for responses from tenants. Brokers wait for the right introduction. Landlords attend industry events hoping to get in front of expanding brands. In some cases, people fly across the country and stand in line at a booth simply to learn whether a company is interested in opening a location in a particular market.
Rafael Weiss believes the system is unnecessarily difficult.
As co-founder and CEO of Sytes, Weiss is building a commercial real estate marketplace designed to connect the people who have property with the companies searching for locations.
The idea came from his own experience as a developer.
Weiss would identify a piece of real estate and attempt to determine whether a restaurant, retailer, or other tenant wanted to open there. That frequently meant relying on existing relationships, sending emails, making calls, or waiting for an industry conference where a brand’s real estate strategy might finally become clearer.
Sometimes the answer arrived too late.
Weiss recalled situations where he had control of a promising property but could not get a response from a potential tenant before the deadline to acquire it. Weeks after the opportunity disappeared, the tenant would finally respond and express interest.
By then, the deal was gone.
For Weiss, those were not minor communication problems. A single lease can create millions of dollars in value for the developer while helping a brand expand into a profitable new market.
The opportunity existed on both sides.
The connection did not.
“I just didn’t understand why I can’t type an address online,” Weiss said. If he controlled a property, he wanted a simple way to determine whether a brand such as McAlister’s would consider opening there.
That frustration became Sytes.
Weiss and his technical co-founder, Dean, bootstrapped the company with approximately $5,000. Rather than raise a large amount of capital and build an extensive product before finding customers, they sold the concept first.
Customers effectively helped fund the development of the product they wanted.
The approach required Weiss to place marketing at nearly the same level of importance as the software itself.
“Distribution is everything,” he said.
Commercial real estate presented a particularly difficult distribution problem. The industry is deeply relationship-driven and frequently operates through established networks, conventional advertising, and longstanding processes.
Sytes deliberately communicated differently.
The company’s marketing was direct, occasionally confrontational, and designed to cut through the conservative tone common in the industry. Weiss sometimes publicly criticized parts of the commercial real estate business as lazy. Some advertisements included profanity.
LinkedIn became the primary distribution channel.
Without spending money on advertising, Sytes grew to approximately $300,000 in annual recurring revenue through organic LinkedIn content. There was no single post that instantly transformed the company.
Instead, Weiss describes the process as a slow accumulation of attention.
More posts created more demonstrations. More demonstrations created more customers. Announcing new customers gave other people confidence that the platform was gaining traction.
Eventually, word of mouth began generating demonstrations without Weiss needing to publish another post.
The marketplace started to develop momentum.
One of Sytes’ first major customers was GoTo Foods, the parent company behind brands including Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, Moe’s Southwest Grill, McAlister’s, Carvel, Schlotzsky’s, and Jamba.
The platform initially focused on Florida before expanding throughout the Southeast. Success in that market led to Texas.
Texas accelerated quickly.
Soon, GoTo Foods wanted to use the platform nationally.
That expansion exposed Weiss to a larger opportunity than the one he originally intended to pursue.
Sytes was built for developers because Weiss was a developer. He wanted a tool that made his own work easier.
But brokers began using it.
Then landlords became interested.
Large real estate owners could use the platform to lease existing shopping centers. Tenant representatives could identify potential locations for brands. Franchisees could submit properties and communicate with corporate real estate teams.
The product expanded because the market revealed participants Weiss had not originally considered.
For Weiss, that evolution reinforced an important lesson about building marketplaces: capital is not always the solution.
He believes Sytes may have failed if the company had started with a large amount of money.
Marketplaces require activity on multiple sides. Having thousands of registered users means little if those users are not actively creating connections.
During Sytes’ early days, Weiss personally nurtured that activity.
He would notice that someone controlled a property a tenant might want but had not submitted it through the platform. Weiss would call the person and encourage them to send the site.
Sometimes that direct intervention created a deal.
“You almost have to hand-grow this marketplace,” he said.
The objective was not simply to attract users. It was to teach an industry a new behavior.
That philosophy also explains why Weiss resisted making Sytes free.
Many people advised him to remove the price barrier and attract as many users as possible.
He refused.
Weiss believed free users would have little reason to remain engaged. If landlords submitted properties to tenants who were not actively paying attention, the marketplace would appear ineffective even when the underlying technology worked.
Payment created what Weiss describes as skin in the game.
On the tenant side, a broker may pay $99 per month to use the platform. Weiss compares that cost with the potential value of a single completed lease.
The first tenant-side broker to complete a deal through Sytes earned approximately $80,000 in fees, according to Weiss.
On the landlord side, he points to a user whose subscription represented roughly $200 per month and who generated approximately $20 million in lease value.
The platform did not build the shopping center or negotiate every component of those transactions.
It created the connection.
That is the part of commercial real estate Weiss believes has remained unnecessarily inefficient.
Sytes is now working toward extending the platform beyond the initial match.
Today, a landlord or developer can submit real estate to potential tenants through the marketplace. But once both parties decide to move forward, much of the negotiation shifts back to email, phone calls, document exchanges, and traditional redlining.
Weiss wants to capture that process inside Sytes.
His vision is an end-to-end system where a property is discovered, matched with a tenant, negotiated, and ultimately moved through the lease process on one platform.
The expansion could become particularly useful for franchisees.
Sytes already works with first-time and large-scale franchise operators. In some cases, brands are directing franchisees to use the platform to submit potential locations.
Church’s Chicken, for example, has been working with Sytes to onboard franchisees and use the platform as a site submission system.
The opportunity reflects the same problem Weiss experienced as a developer.
Commercial real estate contains enormous amounts of potential value, but the industry’s processes can make accessing that value unnecessarily slow.
Weiss is not attempting to eliminate the people involved.
He wants to eliminate the waiting.
His frustration remains rooted in a simple observation: there are developers with good properties, brands searching for locations, landlords with available space, and brokers attempting to create deals.
Everyone can potentially make money when the right connection occurs.
Yet the industry has historically made those connections difficult to discover.
For Weiss, the question was never whether demand existed.
The question was why, in a digital economy, people still needed to stand in a booth line to find it.
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