Communication is Key, Transparency is Essential
According to Zippia, in the United States roughly 75% of employees rate teamwork and collaboration as very important, while about 86% of employees in leadership positions blame a lack of collaboration as the primary reason for workplace failures. This is particularly relevant to commercial real estate, where operational success requires constant communication and coordination between stakeholders. However, these communications are often disorganized and fragmented across multiple platforms, leaving opportunities for miscommunication, operational oversight, and poor business outcomes. The gaps between these communication platforms are a major pain point for CRE professionals.
What Communication Problems do CRE Professionals Face?
In commercial real estate, poor communication is one of the most commonly cited sources of problems, as reported by Drooms and Statista in their 2025 study. In an industry where situational awareness is crucial to success, fragmented communications systems often lead to communication overload and gaps in coordination. Consider property management, where tenant communications, maintenance requests, and vendor coordination all take place through a convoluted system of phone calls, texts, emails, and in-person visits. The resulting administrative burden is considerable for property managers, who can receive hundreds of emails alone on a daily basis. Such a high volume of communications makes the organization and prioritization of tasks and information difficult to manage. This opens the door for issues like critical repairs being delayed that result in decreased tenant satisfaction.
These communication challenges extend beyond day-to-day property management and also affect owners, asset managers, and executives who require clear visibility and coordination with stakeholders to ensure optimal portfolio performance. Axios reports in their 2025 annual report on internal communications that, among C-suite leaders, 48% report getting involved in operational projects more than they should because of ineffective communication and 43% report spending excessive time reinforcing communications with staff. The extra time spent on communicating has an opportunity cost of time spent on other value-creation activities. Due to the interconnected nature of job functions in the industry, communication issues faced by different stakeholders in CRE often compound and cause problems throughout all levels of an organization. The current way of communicating in commercial real estate leaves teams disconnected and misaligned, stuck in a fight to stay caught up rather than free to work on getting ahead.
How Does Cardinal Address Communication Problems?
At Cardinal, we believe it's the communication friction points—those places in between—that create the biggest operational challenges. We’ve designed our CRE software to eliminate these friction points by centralizing your communications and organizing them to maintain context and visibility across teams. Users can expect the following:
Inbox Organization and Filtering
The Cardinal Inbox is the central hub for managing email communications, organizing threads, creating issues from conversations, and collaborating with your team. It provides powerful search and filtering capabilities to help you stay on top of all property-related communications.
Searchable Threads
Search across all your communications using natural language queries to quickly find results by:
- Email addresses and contact names
- Subject lines and message contents
- Property addresses and names
- Attachment names and file contents
Issues
The Issues section is your comprehensive tool for tracking and managing maintenance requests, property issues, tenant concerns, and general tasks across your property portfolio. Easily turn an email into an issue to provide robust workflow management, team collaboration, and status tracking to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Contacts Shared Across an Organization
The Contacts module is your centralized system for managing all relationships in your portfolio. It includes both individual contacts (people) and organizations (companies), all organized by your organization to ensure data privacy and security.
These features work together to keep your team on the same page by making communication more transparent and more effective. With Cardinal serving as your central source of truth, you get fewer lost conversations, faster information retrieval, and a clearer path from discussion to delivery. Simply put, Cardinal gives you back the hours of your week that you’re losing on inefficient communication and empowers you to do more.