How to Use Claude AI for Commercial Real Estate: Part 2 — Building Skills for Brokers and Asset Managers

In Part 1, we covered the basics of using Claude directly — pasting in a lease, asking for a summary, getting a first pass on a redline. That works. But it has a limit: every time you open a new chat, you're starting from zero. You retype the same instructions, re-explain the same context, and hope you remember every constraint you cared about last time.

Claude Skills fix that. A Skill is a set of instructions you write once — how to review a lease, how to triage an inbox, how to summarize a rent roll — that Claude then uses automatically, every time, without you re-explaining it. It's the difference between training someone new every Monday morning and having someone who already knows the job.

What a Skill Actually Is

Strip away the terminology and a Claude Skill is a text file with two parts.

A short description that tells Claude what the Skill does and when to use it. Claude reads this first, for every Skill you have — it's small on purpose, so having a dozen Skills installed doesn't slow anything down.

A set of instructions that Claude only reads in full once it decides your request matches that description. This is where the actual "how" lives — the steps, the format you want, the things you always forget to mention.

That's the whole mechanism. Claude checks the short description against what you're asking for, and if it matches, it goes and reads the longer instructions before responding. You write it once. It applies every time, for you or anyone else on your team who has the Skill installed.

Where it lives depends on how you use Claude. In claude.ai, you upload a Skill as a small file (or a zipped folder if it includes extra reference material) under Customize in Add Skills , and it's available in every conversation from then on. If your team uses Claude Code or a shared workspace, Skills live in a folder anyone on the team can point to — meaning one person builds it, and the whole team benefits without redoing the work.

The Shape of a Good Skill

The single most common mistake is building a Skill that tries to do too much. A Skill that "handles emails" is worse than three Skills that each do one thing well — one for daily priorities, one for drafting follow-ups, one for flagging anything mentioning a deadline. Narrow and specific beats broad and clever, every time.

A good Skill has four parts:

A name — lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive. daily-email-priorities, not helper or email-thing.

A description that states both what it does and when to use it. "Reviews recent email and ranks what needs attention today" is a real description. "Helps with email" is not — Claude has nothing to match against.

Instructions written as steps, not paragraphs. If there's a sequence, number it. If there's a judgment call, say what the default should be rather than listing five options and hoping Claude picks the right one.

An example or two — a realistic input and the output you'd actually want back. This does more work than another paragraph of explanation. Claude is very good at pattern-matching from one clear example; it's much worse at inferring your preferences from an abstract description.

Keep the whole thing short. If you're writing more than a page, you're probably trying to solve two problems in one Skill — split it.

Build This: A Daily Priorities Skill From Your Email

Here's a complete, working example. This is the Skill worth building first, because everyone in CRE — broker, asset manager, ops lead — starts the day the same way: staring at an inbox trying to figure out what actually matters.

Start a new chat and type /skill-creator

Step 1 — Define the job in one sentence. "Look at what's come in over the last day or two and tell me what actually needs my attention today, in order." That sentence is your description, almost word for word.

Step 2 — Write the instructions as a checklist. Be specific about what counts as urgent in your world — for CRE, that usually means anything with a date attached: an LOI deadline, a lease expiration, an option window, a closing date.

Step 3 — Give it one real example. Not a description of the format — an actual input and the exact output you want.

Here's what the finished Skill file looks like:

---
name: daily-email-priorities
description: Review recent email and produce a ranked list of what needs
  attention today, flagging deadline-sensitive CRE items like LOIs, lease
  expirations, option windows, and closing dates. Use when the user asks
  what to prioritize today, wants an inbox summary, or asks to review
  recent emails for urgent items.
---

# Daily Email Priorities

## Instructions

1. Pull emails from the last 24–48 hours that are unread, flagged, or in
   the primary inbox — skip newsletters and promotions.
2. Sort into three buckets:
   - Urgent — deadline attached: mentions a specific date, an LOI, a
     lease expiration, an option deadline, a closing date, or phrasing
     like "by end of day" or "by Friday."
   - Needs a response: a direct question or request from a client,
     tenant, landlord, or colleague with no stated deadline.
   - FYI — no action needed.
3. Within "Urgent," rank soonest deadline first.
4. For each item in "Urgent" and "Needs a response," write one line:
   who it's from, what they need, and the deadline if one was stated.
5. Flag anything that mentions: LOI, lease, exclusive, co-tenancy,
   closing, option, default, estoppel, or assignment — these tend to
   be higher-stakes even without an obvious deadline.
6. Output as a ranked list under three headers: Urgent, Needs a
   Response, FYI. Keep each line to one sentence.

## Example

**Input:** Inbox with 40 emails from the last two days.

**Output:**

---
name: daily-email-priorities
description: Review recent email and produce a ranked list of what needs
  attention today, flagging deadline-sensitive CRE items like LOIs, lease
  expirations, option windows, and closing dates. Use when the user asks
  what to prioritize today, wants an inbox summary, or asks to review
  recent emails for urgent items.
---

# Daily Email Priorities

## Instructions

1. Pull emails from the last 24–48 hours that are unread, flagged, or in
   the primary inbox — skip newsletters and promotions.
2. Sort into three buckets:
   - Urgent — deadline attached: mentions a specific date, an LOI, a
     lease expiration, an option deadline, a closing date, or phrasing
     like "by end of day" or "by Friday."
   - Needs a response: a direct question or request from a client,
     tenant, landlord, or colleague with no stated deadline.
   - FYI — no action needed.
3. Within "Urgent," rank soonest deadline first.
4. For each item in "Urgent" and "Needs a response," write one line:
   who it's from, what they need, and the deadline if one was stated.
5. Flag anything that mentions: LOI, lease, exclusive, co-tenancy,
   closing, option, default, estoppel, or assignment — these tend to
   be higher-stakes even without an obvious deadline.
6. Output as a ranked list under three headers: Urgent, Needs a
   Response, FYI. Keep each line to one sentence.

## Example

**Input:** Inbox with 40 emails from the last two days.

**Output:**

---
name: daily-email-priorities
description: Review recent email and produce a ranked list of what needs
  attention today, flagging deadline-sensitive CRE items like LOIs, lease
  expirations, option windows, and closing dates. Use when the user asks
  what to prioritize today, wants an inbox summary, or asks to review
  recent emails for urgent items.
---

# Daily Email Priorities

## Instructions

1. Pull emails from the last 24–48 hours that are unread, flagged, or in
   the primary inbox — skip newsletters and promotions.
2. Sort into three buckets:
   - Urgent — deadline attached: mentions a specific date, an LOI, a
     lease expiration, an option deadline, a closing date, or phrasing
     like "by end of day" or "by Friday."
   - Needs a response: a direct question or request from a client,
     tenant, landlord, or colleague with no stated deadline.
   - FYI — no action needed.
3. Within "Urgent," rank soonest deadline first.
4. For each item in "Urgent" and "Needs a response," write one line:
   who it's from, what they need, and the deadline if one was stated.
5. Flag anything that mentions: LOI, lease, exclusive, co-tenancy,
   closing, option, default, estoppel, or assignment — these tend to
   be higher-stakes even without an obvious deadline.
6. Output as a ranked list under three headers: Urgent, Needs a
   Response, FYI. Keep each line to one sentence.

## Example

**Input:** Inbox with 40 emails from the last two days.

**Output:**

Save that as SKILL.md, upload it, and try it on a real inbox. The first version is never quite right — you'll notice it either flags too much (everything looks "urgent") or misses something you cared about. Adjust the wording in step 2 and ask Claude to update the skill. Two or three rounds of that gets you something genuinely useful.

Skills Worth Building, By Role

Once the pattern clicks, the same four-part shape applies to almost anything repetitive. Here's a starting list by role — none of these require anything beyond what's in this guide.

For Brokers

• Listing package summarizer — turn a broker's OM or flyer into a one-page pull: size, rent, key terms, comps context.

• LOI first-pass scanner — flag anything unusual against your standard terms before it goes to your attorney.

• Market comp digest — feed it a batch of comps and get a ranked summary by relevance to a specific pitch.

• Daily priorities from inbox — the Skill built above, tuned for a deal-heavy calendar.

• Follow-up drafts from call notes — paste in rough notes from a tour or call, get a clean follow-up email draft in your voice.

For Ops Teams

• Work order triage — sort incoming maintenance requests by urgency and trade before they hit a technician's queue.

• Vendor invoice sanity-check — flag line items that look inconsistent with the contract or prior invoices.

• COI expiration tracker — summarize which tenant or vendor certificates of insurance are expiring in the next 30 days from a batch of documents.

• Meeting notes to action items — turn a rough transcript into a clean list of owners and deadlines.

• Recurring compliance checklist runner — walk through a standard checklist against a set of documents and flag gaps.

For Asset Management

• Rent roll variance flagger — compare this month's rent roll to last month's and surface what changed.

• Renewal and option deadline digest — scan a batch of lease summaries and produce a ranked list of upcoming windows.

• Investor update first draft — turn raw performance numbers into a clean narrative draft you edit rather than write from scratch.

• CAM true-up sanity check — flag CAM reconciliation line items that look inconsistent with the prior year without doing the full audit.

• Lease abstract quick-check — compare a single lease against a standard field checklist and flag anything missing or unusual.

Every one of these is deliberately scoped to a single document or a single day's work. That's the honest limit of a Skill you build yourself in an afternoon — it's excellent at one well-defined task, run one document or one inbox at a time.

Where This Gets Hard

The lease abstract quick-check above works fine on one lease. It starts to strain the moment you're running it across hundreds of leases with ten amendments each, where the real question isn't "what does this clause say" but "what's actually operative after everything that's happened to this lease since it was signed" — and where a missed cross-reference isn't a minor inconvenience, it's a number in a rent roll that's wrong for a year.

That's not a Skill problem. It's a different category of problem — reconciling conflicting provisions across a document history, holding a portfolio's worth of context at once, and doing it reliably enough that your team can trust the output without re-checking every line. Simple Skills like the ones above are worth building regardless; they'll save you real time on the work that's actually simple. Just go in knowing where that ends.

Two Ways to Go From Here

If you want to get good at building these yourself — for your own inbox, your own team's recurring work, whatever's eating your week — that's a skill worth having in-house, and it's genuinely learnable in an afternoon with the right guidance. Get hands-on training built around your team's actual workflows or reach out directly at hello@sienamahuja.com.

If you'd rather skip the trial-and-error and go straight to something built, tested, and reliable at portfolio scale — the kind of thing that doesn't need three rounds of "why did it miss that" — that's what we build. Talk to Bryckel or email sales@bryckel.ai.