Off Market Commercial Real Estate Deal Sourcing With AI: Buy-Box Database, LLC Owners and Condition Scores

What Ruud-Johnson Describes: An AI Machine for Off Market Commercial Real Estate

Cole Ruud-Johnson's X bio describes a "Direct-To-Seller Real Estate Guy" helping investors source more deals. The post opens: "We built a machine that chases down off-market commercial RE deals with AI. Finds properties in your buy box, pierces LLCs, finds contact information, initiates marketing, & more."

He says it is for multifamily, self-storage "or any other commercial assets," and that the company has worked with "dozens of commercial investors." The post promotes that service. The steps are public and specific, though, and the post names the tools you can use yourself. Results the post cites, such as clients "trading LOIs" and contact coverage figures, are the author's claims.

Step 1: An Off Market Commercial Real Estate Database for Your Buy Box

"Build an aggregated database." The company scrapes its own data, but "You don't have to do that tho. You can go to Reonomy, CoStar, & others and build an aggregated database with all assets in your buy box."

The catch: "Only 40-60% will have decent contact information." To hold it all, "You can use Manus to build a portal to host it all." Manus is a general-purpose AI agent.

Step 2: Finding the Real Owners of Off Market Commercial Real Estate

Commercial properties are often owned by LLCs, so the name on the record isn't the person to call. "We use GovFiles to pierce LLCs and find the real owners of each asset. You can have Manus wire up their API in a few minutes so this happens automatically."

Then every record goes through what the post calls a three-phase enrichment flow:

• LLC skip-trace
• Individual skip-trace
• Business skip-trace

The post says that "even across 15,000+ properties in your database, you should have quality contact info on 95%+ of the assets."

Step 3: Ranking Off Market Commercial Real Estate by Physical Condition

"From there, you can use satellite & Street View images from Google to rank properties based on physical condition, wiring that up via API in a few minutes." The post doesn't say how the score is used. One practical use: deciding which owners to contact first.

Step 4: Marketing to Off Market Commercial Real Estate Owners

The marketing step is mostly people and mail rather than AI: trained overseas cold callers ("Follow DNC & TCPA rules"), video postcards that "play a real video testimonial from a past seller when opened," and "a great online presence, social proof, & reviews." The callers are part of the service the company sells, at an hourly rate quoted in the post.

Ruud-Johnson says a follow-up post will cover building an agent and JV pipeline "so other people bring you their deals first."

How to Try It: An Off Market Commercial Real Estate Prompt for Manus

The post doesn't include prompts. The prompt below is ours, for step 1 and the setup of step 2, using an export you already have rights to. Wiring GovFiles or a skip-trace service needs your own account and API key with that provider.

Build me a simple private web portal to manage an off market commercial real estate prospect list.

1. Import [CSV export from Reonomy / CoStar / other], which lists every asset in my buy box: [asset type, size range, markets].
2. One row per property: address, asset type, size, year built, owner name on record, owner mailing address, and any contact fields in the export.
3. Flag each owner as "Entity" (LLC, LP, Inc, trust) or "Individual".
4. Add empty fields for: real owner name, owner phone, owner email, contact source, skip-trace status (LLC / individual / business), condition score (1-5), condition notes, outreach status, and do-not-contact.
5. Add filters by asset type, market, owner type, condition score and outreach status, plus a CSV export.
6. Show a count of properties with and without usable contact info.

Don't contact anyone or call any outside service yet. When this works, I'll give you API credentials for [owner research / skip-trace provider] and we'll connect it as a separate step.

What to Check Before Contacting Off Market Commercial Real Estate Owners

• Data licenses. Check that your data provider's terms allow exporting into your own tool.
• Owner matches. Spot-check the people found behind LLCs against state filings before you reach out.
• Contact accuracy. Test enrichment on a small batch and measure how many numbers and emails actually work.
• Condition scores. Imagery can be old. Look at a few top-ranked properties yourself.
• Calling and texting rules. Scrub against do-not-call lists and follow TCPA and state rules, as the post says.