ListingMine Is the Excel of Real Estate: Why Serious Agencies Stop Building "Custom ERPs"
There is a simple way to end the build-vs-buy debate in real estate software.
Use Excel.
Not as a metaphor for spreadsheets — but as a category of infrastructure. ListingMine is the Excel of Real Estate — not a spreadsheet, but the same category of adaptable, user-controlled infrastructure for your core operations.
Nobody Builds Their Own Excel
No serious business leader wakes up and says:
- "Let's hire a team of engineers, build our own spreadsheet engine from scratch, maintain the source code forever, and hope it works."
They buy Excel. Or Google Sheets.
Not because Excel is "perfect," but because it is infrastructure. It is:
- General-purpose and battle-tested.
- Flexible enough to adapt to ten thousand workflows.
- Stable enough to survive decades of business change.
Most importantly, it removes a non-core problem from your life so you can focus on running your business. That is the category ListingMine belongs to.
The "90-Second Pivot": The Joy of Real Infrastructure
To understand the power of an infrastructure layer, imagine this scenario:
A developer suddenly changes the sales quota for a project. To stay competitive, you must pivot your team's commission tiers from a flat 4% split to a 6% split, minus an RM5,000 buyer rebate from the agency account, plus a 40/60 profit-sharing arrangement with a 3rd party. You also include a "433 scheme" as buyers acquisition.
To complicate it further, all agent commissions and overriding must then be redistributed through their individual subsale schemes because the people involved are "rented" agents from your subsale team.
The Custom ERP Experience:
You call your vendor. They send a quote for an RM20,000 "logic modification" and put you in a 3-week development queue. Your admins spend those three weeks manually calculating commissions in the "cracks" of the system.
The ListingMine Experience:
You adjust the logic yourself in 90 seconds. No developers, no invoices, no downtime.
This is the difference between owning a tool and being owned by one.
The "Half-ERP, Half-Manual" Trap
Many agencies claim to have proprietary ERPs to signal sophistication. But if you look behind the curtain, you see the same pattern everywhere: They are running a hybrid of half-ERP and half-Excel.
Because custom systems are hard-coded, they are brittle. The moment reality shifts — a new recruitment model or a project exception like the one above — the ERP stops keeping up.
Admins quietly patch the gaps with manual processes. The irony is brutal: Agencies pay six figures for "enterprise software," while the actual business logic still lives in fragmented spreadsheets.
Custom ERPs Are the "Software Statue" Fallacy
When an agency builds a custom ERP, they aren't building a strategy. They are building a "Software Statue." It looks impressive the day it's unveiled, but it is frozen in time.
They end up with:
- Custom rules that break as the business grows.
- Custom maintenance that drains capital.
- Custom bugs that paralyze operations.
Your advantage is recruiting, training, closing, and culture — not software engineering. Building your own ERP does not make you sophisticated; it makes you responsible for infrastructure you never needed to own.
The Hidden Cost: Paying for "Permission"
Custom ERP vendors do not just sell software. They sell permission.
- RM5,000 to add a new commission tier.
- RM3,000 to change a report format.
- RM10,000 to modify a workflow.
This is the real tax. You are not paying for value; you are paying because leaving is expensive.
Ask yourself: Would you still use Excel if Microsoft charged RM1 for every formula you inserted into a cell? Of course not. Yet this is exactly how most agency ERPs operate. They "work" because you are a hostage.
ListingMine Is the Operating Layer
ListingMine is not a vendor system you endlessly customize. It is the operating layer that mirrors the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the power of an enterprise engine.
- Adapt inside the system: You change the logic, not the code.
- No toll gates: You make decisions without asking for a developer's permission.
- Built for evolution: Agents can come and go, teams restructure, and logic shifts instantly.
The Strategic Reframe
The real question for an Agency Principal is not: "Should we build or buy?"
The real question is: "Is this infrastructure — or is this our strategy?"
If it is infrastructure, you do not build it. You standardize it. No one brags about building their own Excel; they brag about what they build with it.
ListingMine is the infrastructure layer your agency runs on. Once you see it that way, the build-vs-buy debate quietly disappears.
