Everybody's in Procurement Now

Nobody put it in your job description. But somewhere between the AI announcements, the conference demos, the LinkedIn posts promising to transform your workflow in eleven minutes, and the vendor who found your email, you became a software evaluator. Everyone did.

This is the condition of working in real estate (or anywhere, really) in 2026. The tools proliferate. The pitches accelerate. The decisions accumulate. And the people making them are, more often than not, doing it as a side function of a job that was already full.

Sarah Campion has been doing this for a long time.

She heads asset management at GoldOller Real Estate Investments, a vertically integrated multifamily operator with over 50 properties across secondary markets. She has been with the company for 15 years. For most of that time, technology decisions have landed on her desk — not because she was the IT department, but because she was the one who understood both what the business needed and how a tool would actually have to work in practice.

She has sat through more demos than she can count. She used to attend all of them. Now she sends someone else first.

"A tech could look amazing to an investor. But there's a whole other side of actually having it be successful — and that's getting your team to use it accurately and properly, and having the time."

This is the thing that gets lost in the pitch cycle. A product is not the thing running on a vendor's laptop during a demo. It is the thing that gets used — or doesn't — by a team that already has a full job to do. The gap between those two versions of a product is where most technology investments quietly fail.

Campion has learned to ask different questions than the ones vendors are prepared for.

Not: what can this do? But: what happens six months after we sign, when we have a problem and the salesperson has moved on?

Not: does this integrate with our systems? But: how many of my people will actually use this, and what will it take to get them there?

Not: what does the roadmap look like? But: when a client asked for something specific, did you build it and how long did it take?

Her framework for evaluating a new tool is practical to the point of being almost blunt: "Talk to someone who actually uses it." Not a reference the vendor arranged. Someone in your network. The kind of conversation that happens at a conference or on a call with a peer. “We all work together,” she says. “We all know somebody out there, probably at every company there is.”

Read the contract before you fall in love with the interface. Specifically: make sure there is a real trial period before you are locked in.

And on AI, where the volume of unsolicited advice has become its own weather pattern: Campion says to 'skip the Instagram influencers'. Find sources that are accountable. People whose names are attached to real companies and real track records. Then get in and try it yourself. Stop waiting for industry consensus.

"You just have to get in there and try." She says this not as a revelation, but as someone who's moved past the point most people are still debating.

Two years ago, GoldOller chose symmetRE as their asset management platform. The decision came down to something Campion considers a precondition, not a feature: there would be a dedicated person on the other side of the contract, someone who would still be there after the onboarding call ended.

"What made me go with symmetRE was I felt like they had a dedicated support team that was going to be able to assist us and not just drop a software in our lap."

What followed was the kind of working relationship she looks for. Reporting that once took asset managers an hour per property now takes under five minutes. Partner calls run off a single dashboard. A custom occupancy metric — projected physical occupancy using only approved leases, not all applicants — was built to GoldOller's spec because they asked for it, and the team moved.

Her philosophy on technology? "Open but responsible...That kind of summarizes me in a nutshell."

And that's not a bad mindset for anyone who finds themselves, unexpectedly, in the business of deciding which tools their organization bets on.

Which is, more or less, everyone now.

Sarah Campion is Vice President of Asset Management at GoldOller Real Estate Investments.

GoldOller Real Estate Investments was founded 16 years ago as a conventional investment platform focused on multifamily assets in secondary markets. Today, roughly 90% of their portfolio sits in that category, with additional exposure to office, storage, mixed-use, and new development. Learn more at https://goldoller.com/.

No pitch, no pressure. If you're curious how other firms are using symmetRE, we'd love to share more. Say hello → hello@symmetre.com.