A brokerage in Dubai does not run on one system. It runs on a CRM for the pipeline and WhatsApp for the client. Then a portal account for the leads, a spreadsheet for commission, an HR tool for leave, and something else again for payroll.
Six logins. Five places the same number gets typed twice. And no single screen where an owner can see what is actually happening.
We kept meeting that setup in client work. COM8 STUDIO builds websites and marketing for property companies, so we spend a lot of time on the front of the funnel. The pattern was always the same: the leads arrived fine, and then the process behind them was held together by memory and message threads. Fixing the top does not help if the deal stalls underneath.
So we built the system instead. COM8 Realty is a real estate CRM that covers the whole brokerage in one account, and it is live now.
What it replaces
Five separate things, in one place:
- The CRM and the pipeline
- The messaging and calling tool for the team
- The commission spreadsheet
- The HR system for attendance and leave
- The payroll product for WPS
That last pair is the part almost no real estate CRM covers. A CRM that stops when the deal closes leaves the hardest work of the month, paying people correctly, sitting outside the system that knows what they closed.
One pipeline, built around how deals actually move
Every enquiry lands in the same inbox: WhatsApp, Outlook, Gmail, Bayut, Property Finder, Dubizzle, the website form, or an agent typing it in directly.
From there it becomes one record that carries its own history. Source, budget, preferred location, property interest, assigned agent, next action. When it moves to a deal, the messages and tasks move with it rather than being left behind in a different app.
The stages follow the way a property deal actually runs: lead, qualified, viewing, offer, escrow. Viewings sit on a shared calendar rather than in one agent's head, so a manager can see the week's bookings without asking anyone.
Rentals, sales, off-plan and owner acquisition each get their own pipeline. They do not behave the same way, and averaging them into one set of stages hides which part of the business is working.
Capture every enquiry, never work a duplicate
The most expensive thing that happens on a busy desk is two agents working the same buyer.
It happens because one client enquires on three portals over two weeks, and nothing joins those three enquiries together. COM8 Realty flags when several enquiries trace back to the same person, so the duplicate is visible before anyone has spent a week on it.
Sequences handle the follow-up from there. You build the cadence once, enroll the lead, and the system runs the steps across email and WhatsApp until someone replies. The sequence pauses the moment a client answers, so nobody receives an automated message in the middle of a real conversation.
Find properties, explore locations, close deals
Listings sit on a map as well as in a list, with search by location and filters for beds, status, type and price.
That sounds cosmetic and it is not. A buyer says they want three bedrooms near JBR under a certain figure. The useful answer is what exists around that point right now, not a filtered spreadsheet the agent then has to interpret. Being able to see it geographically is the difference between answering in the meeting and answering the next day.
Most CRMs stop at the buyer. We start at the owner.
This is the part we are most confident is missing from the market.
When a deal closes, the work does not stop. Somebody has to calculate the agent's share, apply the team lead and referrer splits, handle the holdback, deal with VAT, get it approved, and then actually pay it. Then the same brokerage has to run attendance, leave, onboarding and a WPS payroll file.
In most brokerages that lives in a spreadsheet and a second system. In COM8 Realty it is one module, with:
- Commissions calculated on the closed deal, including splits, referrer shares, holdbacks, VAT and manager overrides
- Payout runs, so approval to payment is one flow rather than an email chain
- Trust accounting aligned with RERA and DLD requirements
- A Zoho Books or QuickBooks connector, so the accountant's ledger stays current
- WPS ready payroll preparation, approvals and export
- Attendance, leave, rosters, onboarding, letters, asset management and review cycles in the same HR module
One subscription, not a CRM plus a separate HR tool. The full breakdown by plan is on the brokerage page.
Getting your data across
The first question every brokerage asks is what happens to the data already sitting in another system, or in a spreadsheet.
Contacts and listings import by CSV on any plan, so a small team can move itself over in an afternoon. Larger brokerages get more help: onboarding, data migration and support designed to get a brokerage live in days rather than months. On the enterprise tier a dedicated onboarding specialist maps your existing process into the platform, migrates the data and trains the team. The software follows how you already work, instead of the other way round.
If you want a migration plan before committing to anything, the team replies within one business day.
Qora: ask your brokerage anything
Qora is the AI layer, and the useful part is not that it writes text. It is that it can answer questions about your own data.
Which leads need follow-up. How much commission is pending. Which deals are closing soon. Summarise my pipeline. Match this buyer with listings.
It also does the reading nobody wants to do. Qora takes a contract PDF or a DLD form and pulls out the key terms, the signatures and the payout structure. On a busy month that is hours of someone's attention returned.
Alongside that, an AI layer reviews the pipeline overnight and hands managers a ranked brief in the morning, flagging the deals at risk and the listings going stale. The point is not to replace judgement. It is to make sure a stalling deal is noticed on day three rather than week six. That matters more in a slower market, which is what the Dubai numbers currently show.
What we deliberately did not build
A launch post that only lists features is not much use, so here is the other side.
| Not in it | Why |
|---|---|
| Publishing listings out to the portals | The connectors bring enquiries in. Pushing listings out is a different job and we would rather not half-build it. |
| A full landlord and tenant property management module | If a large part of your revenue is managing rented units, a specialist tool is genuinely deeper. |
| A property valuation engine | Valuation is a regulated, data-heavy problem and we are not pretending to solve it. |
| Trakheesi permit handling | Not in the product today. We are not going to imply otherwise. |
We would rather be honest about the edges than have a brokerage discover them in week two.
Who it is for
| If this is you | Where to start |
|---|---|
| One agent, wants a real pipeline instead of a spreadsheet | The free plan, no card |
| Two or three agents who need AI follow-up | Basic, AED 79 per month |
| A growing sales team that needs shared visibility | Brokerage, AED 99 per seat |
| You pay commission and run payroll in house | Brokerage Plus, AED 149 per seat |
| Multi office group needing branch controls and SSO | Enterprise, quoted |
Support scales with the plan. Brokerage adds priority support, and enterprise engagements include a dedicated success contact with SLA options.
And who it is not for. If you manage rented units as your main business, or you need a valuation engine, this is not the closest fit. We will say so on a call.
What building it changed about how we work
One thing worth saying, since this is COM8 STUDIO's blog and not a press release.
Building software for this market taught us more about our clients' businesses than any discovery call has. You cannot design a commission module without understanding exactly how a brokerage pays a referrer. You cannot build WPS export without reading the rules properly.
That has changed how we approach web design work for property clients too. A website that generates enquiries into a broken process is a website that generates complaints. We now ask what happens after the form is submitted, because we have had to build that part.
We also published a separate comparison of the eight real estate CRMs in this market. It names where competitors beat us.
Try it
The free plan is live at com8realty.com and needs no credit card. One agent, real pipeline, no trial clock.
Every paid plan has a 14 day free trial, with no charge until day 15, and you can cancel any time. So the decision does not need to be made from a demo.
If you are planning seats for a team, compare the brokerage plans first, because commission payouts and WPS payroll sit on Brokerage Plus rather than the entry tiers. For multi office groups, the enterprise tier covers branch level permissions, SSO and audit logs.
And if you want to tell us what is missing, that is genuinely more useful to us right now than a compliment.
