Willz Tolbert might look young, but he started working as a real estate broker right out of college and he made quite an impact with his company, Tolbert Property Advisors, which focuses on investment sales and development.
But even as his success steadily grew, Tolbert found himself frustrated when he would attempt to research and prospect new properties.
“As a commercial real estate developer and broker, I always lived with GIS (Geographic Information System) maps. But each county has their own map, so when you go from county to county you have to hop from map to map and it becomes very cumbersome. And then when you get there, the property data is constantly changing so you have to manually put into a spreadsheet and when you do that, obviously the data doesn’t update.”
Plus, when Tolbert was researching property, it was often a struggle to determine to whom it belonged.
“Most commercial properties and an increasing number of residential properties are owned by LLCs,” he says. “So when researching and prospecting, that makes it very difficult to find out who actually owns the property.”
Tolbert, who’d tinkered with creating apps in his spare time for years, decided to work on an application that would streamline the real estate research process. After collaborating with the Greenville mobile app design and custom software development company Designli, he came up with an app called Infill.
“Infill is a multiplayer mapping software for property research, site selection and prospecting,” he says. “We’ve got properties nationwide on the app, with all the parcel data that you would expect from any premium GIS tool, but there are three differentiators. Unmasking LLCs is one, and then there’s the multiplayer environment on the map, which is similar to Google Docs, so you can edit in real time. And the third is connecting other real estate data sources.”
The connection of different sources is an important innovation, Tolbert notes.
“In real estate there’s no real universal language,” he says, “which makes connecting data sources really difficult. So what we are able to do with Infill is connect in third party data sources, so you won’t have to hop between multiple applications, and you can view all of your data in context.”
Tolbert says the Infill app has a lot of potential to grow.
“Our vision is to the be the single interface for real estate world data,” he says. “The idea is to continuously be innovating on that user interface over the web application, mobile application, and in the near future with A.I glasses, we’ll be on the cutting edge of that. You’ll be able to walk down the street and see a building and point to it and get all the data you can imagine on that building. That’s where we see it going.”
- For more info on the app, visit https://www.getinfill.com/
- Tolbert Property’s notable transactions and projects include Falls Walk luxury townhomes, the Academy & Payne St. Assemblage, and Conyers Station.
- Tolbert began his collaboration with Designli in 2019.
