The commercial finance brokerage operating model
Built from discovery work with owner-led commercial brokerages. The pattern is consistent: the broker is paid for lender negotiation and client relationships, and spends most of the week on everything else. This prototype shows the version of the business where the administration runs in the background and the week goes where the fees come from.
The four figures above are from Alvo discovery sessions with owner-led commercial brokerages. Every number inside the demonstration screen below is invented.
A Monday morning, with the administration already done.
Demonstration environment with an invented brokerage. Nothing here is a new platform: every panel is a configured assistant and workflow running inside the broker's own Microsoft or Google environment, reading the aggregator CRM in place.
The data is in the aggregator's system. The method is in the broker's head.
Owner-led commercial brokerages tend to write across commercial and residential for the same clients, often high net worth, usually referred by accountants and financial planners. That makes how client information is handled more important than any efficiency gain, and it is the reason most of them have held off on AI.
Underneath, the data sits in an aggregator CRM built for residential brokers. Commercial deals live on a separate board, the dashboard does not read them accurately, commission statements do not reconcile to settlements, and a previous automation attempt usually failed because it tried to build inside that system. The questioning that produces the conversion rate is not written down anywhere.
Four milestones, each with a gate and a measure.
Data and access layer · 3 to 4 weeks
Read the aggregator CRM through its documented API on a schedule, pulling only the fields needed, into a store the broker owns. The pattern is designed against the aggregator platforms most brokers already run; where a platform changes its API or has none, the scheduled read falls back to the platform's exports, which is the difference between this and the automation that broke. Connect the assistant (Claude by default, on a subscription in your name) to the broker's own Microsoft 365 or Google tenancy under their consent. Includes the access, consent and data-handling review you can hand to a referring accountant. Measure: the broker can query their own client and settlement data without logging into the CRM, and it reconciles.
Commission and trail reconciliation · 2 to 3 weeks
Monthly statement against the independent settlement record, variances flagged with a dollar figure. Can be run as a standalone first milestone with the two-week baseline included; it usually pays for itself the first month it finds a missing upfront. Measure: a report the broker can send to the aggregator.
Engagement sequence · 4 to 6 weeks
Discovery call to paid engagement automated end to end: call summary and engagement letter into the client folder, invoice issued, document request triggered on payment. Measure: the 24-hour turnaround holds with the manual steps gone, hours a week come back against a baseline.
Intelligence layer · 4 to 5 weeks
Discovery calls captured as structured data, so the questions, objections and signals behind the conversion rate become a business asset rather than something that leaves with the principal.
Each milestone is priced on its own in the proposal, fixed, and payable only when you confirm it has reached its stated measure. The data layer in milestone one is the foundation for three and four; commission reconciliation can run first on its own, because it only needs the settlement record. The order of the rest is yours. Data, access and who does the work ›
Read in place. Hold as little as possible. Own everything.
Nothing rebuilt inside the CRM
Nothing is rebuilt inside the aggregator CRM. The assistant reads it; the broker's own environment holds the work.
The privacy surface does not widen
The privacy surface does not widen. Drafts go to your own OneDrive or Drive, the assistant runs on business terms that exclude training on your data, and a person sends every memo. That is a materially easier conversation to have with a referring accountant than a data migration.
You own the result
No Alvo software, no subscription to Alvo. Configurations, prompts and documentation are handed over as built.
Run a commercial brokerage that looks like this?
A discovery session costs nothing. We baseline where the week is going, then price each milestone so you choose what to invest in.