When contact ownership equals commission, duplicates can cost real money.
In this episode of How I Fixed Your Data, we talk with Andrew Schultz, HubSpot & RevOps expert at The Insight Studio — a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner — about fixing data chaos in commercial real estate, one of the toughest industries for CRM data integrity.
In the video below, Andrew explains how his team combined their Audit → Optimize → Implement framework with Koalify to clean up 2,000+ duplicates in HubSpot, fix ownership conflicts, and give agents back their confidence (and their commissions).
🎥 Watch the full episode below:
💥 The Industry Problem: Duplicates That Cost Commissions
Commercial real estate thrives on relationships, but also on contact ownership.
If you own the lead, you earn the commission.
In this client’s portal, agents often changed brokerages but kept the same phone number.
HubSpot, by default, identifies contacts by email, so every time an agent switched firms and used a new email, a new record was created.
Over time, the result was:
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2,000+ duplicate contacts
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Confused ownership records
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Commission disputes
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Lost trust in CRM reporting
As Andrew puts it:
“If I own that lead versus you own that lead, that determines who gets paid. So when data isn’t clean, we’re not just talking about inconvenience — we’re talking about income.”
🧩 The Fix: From Manual Chaos to Automated Confidence
The Insight Studio started, as always, with their Audit → Optimize → Implement framework.
1️⃣ Audit the mess
Andrew’s team dove deep into the client’s HubSpot data, workflows, and processes.
They found that duplicate cleanup was happening manually, quarterly, and inconsistently — often depending on who was in the role at the time.
“We saw quarterly merges in the backend, a sign that someone tried to fix it, but the process wasn’t sustainable.”
2️⃣ Optimize the logic
Instead of relying on HubSpot’s default email matching, Andrew switched to phone-based deduplication using Koalify.
This allowed them to:
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Identify duplicates using first name + last name + phone number
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Add custom fields like Contact Type (“Broker” or “Agent”)
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Create a Shared Contact flag to prevent ownership conflicts
“Phone numbers are the one thing agents keep — even when they move states or change companies. That became our source of truth.”
3️⃣ Implement automation
Once confident in the logic, they built automated workflows using Koalify’s rules + HubSpot properties.
Contacts that met the “safe-to-merge” criteria were automatically merged.
Contacts with potential ownership conflicts stayed for manual review.
⚙️ The Results
Within weeks, the numbers told the story. The brokerage’s CRM went from chaos to clarity:
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Duplicates reduced by over 95% — from more than 2,000 duplicate contacts to fewer than 100.
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Manual cleanup time dropped by 90%, saving roughly 24 hours of tedious, manual merging per cycle.
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Ownership disputes nearly disappeared, as agents could clearly see who owned which lead.
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Trust in HubSpot was restored — agents finally had confidence that their data (and commissions) were accurate.
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Morale improved across the board, as the team could focus on deals instead of data hygiene.
“We eliminated 80% of the problems automatically — so the team could focus their time on the 20% that actually needed a human touch.”
💡 Lessons Learned
The key insight?
Sometimes the source of truth isn’t the contact — it’s the context.
For this client, phone number was the real unique identifier.
For others, it might be a policy ID, listing, or custom object.
Andrew explains:
“In commercial real estate, it’s the listing. In insurance, it’s the policy.
When you identify that anchor, you can deduplicate safely and build trust in your CRM again.”
He also applied the same learnings to an insurance client — this time using custom objects and Koalify’s flexible rules to ensure every policy holder and dependent stayed clean and unique.
🧠 The Takeaway
HubSpot’s default logic (email = identity) doesn’t fit every business model.
For industries with shared inboxes, moving agents, or multiple identifiers, you need context-aware deduplication.
Koalify helps HubSpot partners like The Insight Studio:
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Automate deduplication safely
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Merge records in bulk without losing ownership
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Build workflows that adapt to the client’s data model
Or as Andrew says:
“We’re no longer the janitors, we’re the architects of clean data.”