Lemlist vs Instantly When Every Broker Bought the Same List

Most commercial real estate outreach follows the same shape: a purchased list, a generic value proposition about market knowledge or deal experience, and a sending cadence that looks identical to a dozen competitors also emailing the same owner or tenant rep.

When the recipient can't distinguish your email from the last five they got that week, the tool sending it matters less than what makes yours worth opening.

A useful test is imagining the recipient's inbox at the end of a typical week; if your email would blend into the pile of similar pitches sitting there, no amount of sending optimization fixes that, and it's worth solving before touching either platform.

Lemlist's strength here is attaching something specific to each touch, a note referencing the actual property, a rendered image or landing page tied to that address, rather than a generic pitch about your brokerage's capabilities.

For a broker working a defined set of properties or a specific submarket, that level of specificity is what separates an email from the generic pitch everyone else is sending to the same recipient.

Even a small detail, a recent lease comp near the property or a specific zoning change relevant to the owner's situation, does more work than a longer message built around generic market commentary.

Instantly earns a place when covering an entire submarket genuinely is the strategy, reaching every relevant owner and tenant rep across a defined geography rather than pursuing a shorter list of specific properties.

A brokerage building presence in a new submarket, where the goal is broad awareness rather than a specific deal, benefits from that wider reach more than from property-level personalization it doesn't yet have the relationships to support.

Even in this broader motion, segmenting by property type, office, industrial, retail, tends to outperform one message sent to the whole submarket regardless of asset class, since the concerns of each ownership type genuinely differ.

Choosing Instantly's coverage without genuinely differentiated messaging just makes you one more broker in the same rotation the recipient already ignores; the tool doesn't fix a generic pitch.

Choosing Lemlist's specificity without picking properties and recipients worth that level of effort wastes the tool's real advantage on a list that didn't need it. Neither platform substitutes for deciding, deliberately, whether your strategy this quarter is depth on specific properties or breadth across a submarket.

This decision deserves revisiting every quarter or so, not just once, since a brokerage's active pipeline and submarket priorities shift, and last quarter's split doesn't necessarily still fit.

Look at your current pipeline: if most active conversations trace back to a small number of specific properties or relationships, you're running a depth strategy whether you've named it that or not, and your outreach tool should match.

If your goal is genuinely to become known across a broader submarket before any specific deal exists, breadth is the honest strategy, and the outreach should be built for reach rather than forced into property-level personalization it can't support.

A brokerage new to a submarket often needs to run the breadth motion first, simply to build enough relationships and awareness that a later depth motion on specific properties has anything to work with.

Use these checks to see which motion you are really running:

• Check whether most active conversations trace back to a small number of specific properties or relationships; if so, you are running a depth strategy.
• Ask whether your goal is to become known across a submarket before any specific deal exists; if so, breadth is the honest strategy.
• Judge the strategy by how the messages actually read, not by list size, since a small list with generic messages is still a mass blast.
• Match the tool to the motion: Lemlist for property-specific touches, Instantly for coverage across a submarket.

A large purchased list can create the impression of a breadth strategy even when the actual sending behavior, one generic message repeated to everyone, doesn't earn the differentiation that strategy actually requires.

Conversely, a small list doesn't automatically mean a depth strategy either, if the messages sent to it are just as generic as a mass blast would be.

The real distinguishing factor isn't list size at all, it's whether the message reflects genuine knowledge of the specific property or submarket it's addressing, and that's a discipline that has to be built into the writing process regardless of which tool ends up sending the email.