Breaking Property News 12/3/26
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
‘The actual work, making smart procurement decisions, protecting the owner’s budget was buried under a mountain of emails and calls’ Rihards Trops CEO of TenderPro
Every property manager knows the feeling. You need to find a contractor, get three comparable quotes, coordinate site visits, chase offers that arrive in four different formats, build a manual spreadsheet to compare them, and somehow produce documentation that satisfies the building owner. All while managing a portfolio of properties, tenants, and a hundred other daily priorities.
This is how commercial real estate procurement works in 2026. Email threads. WhatsApp, voice messages. PDFs that don’t match. Excel files built from scratch every time. And at the end of it — a decision that’s difficult to justify, impossible to audit, and almost certainly more expensive than it needed to be. TenderPRO was built to change this.
The problem nobody has fixed
Rihards Trops Founer spent eight years inside the commercial real estate industry, first as a technical services contractor servicing office buildings and shopping centres, then as a property manager responsible for procurement across a portfolio of commercial properties. From both sides of the table, the picture was the same. Property managers were drowning in unstructured communication.
Contractors were submitting carefully prepared offers and hearing nothing back. Building owners were asking for documentation that didn’t exist. And significant amounts of money were being left on the table simply because running a proper competitive tender process took too long.
“I was managing inboxes, not properties,” says Trops. “The actual work, making smart procurement decisions, protecting the owner’s budget was buried under a mountain of emails and calls. Every property manager I knew operated this way. And nobody had fixed it.”
A single tender, managed the traditional way, can consume 30 or more hours of a property manager’s time. Multiply that across a portfolio handling dozens of procurement cycles per year, and the administrative burden becomes unsustainable. The inevitable result: shortcuts. Familiar suppliers get the work without competition.
Contracts auto-renew without market testing. When prices drift upward, there’s no competitive process to push back. Research consistently shows that commercial properties without structured competitive tendering overpay on service contracts by 15 to 25 percent annually. On a significant facilities management spend, that’s a material sum leaving the table every year — not through negligence, but through a broken process.
What TenderPRO does
It is a centralised procurement platform built specifically for commercial real estate. It replaces the entire tender process — from initial announcement to final invoice, within a single, structured environment. For property managers and building owners, the platform transforms what was a fragmented, manual workflow into something clean and repeatable.
Creating a tender takes minutes. The platform includes AI-assisted scope-of-work drafting, so managers no longer stare at a blank page trying to describe a pump replacement or a façade inspection. Technical documents can be attached. Site visit slots are set once, and contractors book directly in the platform, eliminating the back-and-forth scheduling that alone can consume hours on a single procurement.
Offers arrive in a structured, comparable format. No more PDF versus Excel versus voice message. Every submission follows the same template, with cost breakdowns across labour, materials and VAT. Once the deadline passes, offers can be viewed side by side and exported to Excel, which building owners and boards almost always request.
Awarding a contract generates documentation automatically. E-signature is built in. From there, contractors submit completion reports and invoices through the same platform. Everything is stored, timestamped and accessible — creating an audit trail that previously simply didn’t exist.
For service providers and contractors, the system solves a different but equally real problem: visibility. Smaller, high-quality companies have historically struggled to access tender opportunities because property managers rely on a short list of familiar contacts. If you’re not already in someone’s phone, you’re invisible. TenderPRO opens the market notifying all verified providers in the relevant category when a tender goes live, and giving every participant a structured process and a clear outcome notification.
Who is it for?
It is designed for commercial real estate — offices, retail and shopping centres, industrial and logistics properties, and development projects. Any portfolio with multiple active service contracts running simultaneously will find immediate value in the platform. Property managers save significant time on every procurement cycle. Building owners gain transparency, documentation and genuine competitive pricing. Contractors get fair, structured access to opportunities they would otherwise never hear about.
The platform is currently free to register for both property managers and service providers. Paid plans are in development for portfolios requiring higher volumes and advanced features.
CRE is undergoing digital tarnsformation – procurement in the sector not so much
Commercial real estate has seen significant digital transformation in recent years, leasing platforms, tenant management systems, FM software, digital twins. Procurement has largely been left behind. It remains, in most companies, the last major workflow still running on email. TenderPRO is the infrastructure that closes that gap. Not a heavyweight enterprise system requiring months of implementation. Not a public procurement portal designed for government contracts. A practical, fast, daily-use platform built for the specific reality of commercial property management. The founding team is currently growing the platform across the Baltic market and raising a seed round to accelerate expansion into the Nordics and Central Europe.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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