Customer testimonials

How Payne Sharpley built his entire real estate stack on Butterbase, without a dev team

A Forbes Global Properties agent in Silicon Valley runs his pipeline, dialer, client records, and custom apps on one platform, and builds the rest himself.

Payne Sharpley

Luxury real estate agent, Silicon Valley · Co-founder of Citis AI

$25M

Sales volume in his first nine months

Silicon Valley agents with Forbes Global Properties membership

$8.33M

Median sale price in Atherton, 2025

New construction projects running in Q1 2026

I love Butterbase. What stands out most is the freedom to make the platform my own. I can create applications, find leads, and explore new ideas without being limited to one predefined workflow. For an agent who wants more flexibility and control over their tools, that ability to build around their business is a real advantage.

Payne Sharpley, on what he'd tell another top agent

A different kind of real estate problem

Luxury real estate in Silicon Valley doesn't look like regular sales. Payne's market (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos) is a small number of very large, very slow, very relationship-driven deals. The median home in Palo Alto sold for $3.8M in 2025, a record. Atherton sales close at a 105.7% sale-to-list ratio.

His clients are tech founders who exited, high-net-worth families with complex trust structures, and international investors, many of them Mandarin-speaking, who expect discretion, fluency, and speed. The relationship history going into a deal might span years. Three months of dormancy is normal. The details matter, and they have to be there when the deal heats back up.

Payne on why he chose Butterbase

“I wanted the flexibility to build tools around the way I work. My dialer, CRM, and weekly newsletter are all part of that. What appeals to me about Butterbase is being able to create the applications I need and keep adapting them as my business evolves.”

Starting point: a CRM that was actually done

Butterbase's CRM template ships with everything a relationship-driven business needs already built: pipeline stages, contact management, company records, deal tracking, meeting logs, and activity history attached to every person in the system.

You clone it. You have a running backend. The front end is already pointed at it: 29 tables, 55+ functions, Gmail and Google Calendar ingest, a workspace AI agent, realtime updates, and full row-level security, owned completely from day one.

Payne on the CRM and dialer he built

“I built a CRM and dialer on Butterbase for my own workflow. The dialer is used for calling prospects, and I value being able to keep customizing the tools around my business. The flexibility to build additional applications is a big part of what makes the platform useful to me.”

Client search that goes beyond a contact list

Every serious agent has a contact list. The difference is what you can do with it when a specific property comes available. Butterbase's People API is built for exactly this: structured and semantic search across people and companies, backed by enriched profile data. A natural-language query returns ranked results (names, current roles, LinkedIn profiles, work history, company details) in seconds.

For off-market deals where the right buyer is a specific profile (a recently-exited founder, an international investor in a particular range), this is the difference between a targeted list and a cold spreadsheet.

Payne on finding leads

“I use Butterbase to find leads. I appreciate having that capability on a platform where I can also build my own applications and tailor my prospecting workflow to my business.”

Holding records that survive a long dormancy

A relationship might start in March, go cold until July, and come alive again in October when an off-market property matches exactly what the client said they wanted six months ago. By then, half the context is gone in a typical CRM: notes scattered, emails not attached, the timeline of the relationship impossible to reconstruct.

Butterbase stores core entities (people, companies, deals, meetings) in a shared, agent-readable memory layer that persists across the full lifecycle of the relationship. Every meeting logs a transcript. Every note attaches to the right contact and deal. Custom fields handle what no generic schema covers: trust structures, investor nationality, lender contacts, development feasibility notes.

Payne on building beyond the template

“I built a dialer for calling prospects and a CRM, and I also use Butterbase for the weekly newsletter I send out. Those are practical applications of the platform in my business. Being able to keep building in Butterbase means I can create additional applications as new needs come up and shape the tools around the way I want to work.”

Email monitoring that keeps the pipeline honest

Most deals don't die because of bad relationships. They die because something important arrived in an email thread that wasn't connected to the deal record, and nobody noticed.

Butterbase's Gmail integration runs as a continuous ingest: every email thread connected to a contact in the system gets automatically logged against that contact's record. Connect once, and every new thread surfaces in the CRM. Attachments land in the right place. The workspace AI agent can read the full conversation history when summarizing a deal or drafting a follow-up.

From CRM user to platform builder

This is where Payne's story diverges from every other case study about a CRM. He's co-founder of Citis AI, a real estate intelligence platform. He builds real estate software. When the standard template stopped fitting exactly how off-market, high-net-worth deals in Silicon Valley actually move, he didn't work around it. He extended the platform.

Custom applications running on the same Butterbase backend: same auth, same database, same deploy pipeline, same AI agent reading the same records. No second platform. No separate dev team. Most business tools have a ceiling: when the template stops fitting, you either live with the friction or move to a new platform and start over. The 80% is done when you clone. The other 20% is yours to build, on the same stack, without touching a second system.

The bigger picture

Payne is running five new construction projects in Los Gatos and Cupertino in Q1 2026. He's advising international investors navigating a market where prices rose 33% year-over-year for sales above $5M. He's doing it in Mandarin and English, across time zones, for clients who move on their own schedule.

The software that runs that business has to be as fast and specific as the business itself. A one-size-fits-all CRM doesn't work here. A platform you can build on does.

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