All real estate investment firms understand that data is key to decision making. However, a lot of valuable data is trapped inside of PDFs. That means teams either sink hours of time into manual data entry, or that data doesn’t get captured and dies in an inbox. 

Now, with AI Extract, you can automatically capture data from every OM or broker listing that crosses your desk, greatly expanding your firm’s access to data and cutting down on manual work for your team.

The end result is that your business will be able to evaluate more deals and build a proprietary database of market intelligence. And with Dealpath, that data isn’t just being captured—it’s also centralized and standardized, so it can be turned into reports that power insights and smarter investment decisions.

How AI Extract Works 

When you receive an OM or broker listing that you want to capture, simply drag-and-drop the PDF into Dealpath, or forward it to a dedicated email address. AI Extract will then extract data from it using proprietary AI technology developed by our in-house team of engineers based in Silicon Valley. 

When the data extraction is complete, typically in fifteen minutes or less, you can then review the data pulled from the OM, make any necessary updates, and save it as a deal or a comp inside Dealpath.

Market Intelligence, Without the Manual Effort 

AI Extract lets your team capture data from every property or portfolio that crosses your desk—whether you’re interested in pursuing it or not.

Not keen on moving forward? Save that property as a comp inside Dealpath and use it as a reference point when evaluating and underwriting future deals. The larger your database gets, the more precise your decision making. 

When it only takes a few minutes to capture hundreds of data points, you can build out a database without investing significant time in data entry.

Evaluate More Deals & Kickstart Deal Execution

With AI Extract, there’s no limit to the number of deals you can evaluate. You no longer have to hunt through dozens of pages to find the data points that you care about. With the help of AI Extract, you can zero in immediately on the most important information and figure out if a deal is worth pursuing. 

And when you do come across a deal you’re interested in, you can jump straight into the deal execution process. AI Extract allows you to create a deal in Dealpath with all the basic information fleshed out. That means you can go straight into evaluating a deal, speeding up your deal velocity and giving you a better shot at crafting a winning offer.

Preparing for the AI Revolution

For the last few years, we’ve all heard a lot about AI, but it’s hard to separate the hype from the concrete applications that can actually make an impact on your business. 

At Dealpath, we’re committed to bringing the power of AI to the CRE industry. We’ve applied AI to Power Search, our global search engine that lets you search all your data in Dealpath, even inside documents, and now we’re applying that technology to AI Extract. 

No one really knows where AI is going, but if you want to take advantage of this paradigm shift, one thing is certain: your firm’s data needs to be centralized, standardized, and structured in a way that AI can actually make use of it. While flexible enough to accommodate unique workflows, Dealpath’s data structure brings consistent organization to your data so you can leverage it for insight, push it out to the rest of your tech stack, and capitalize on whatever AI developments are coming in the future.

With Dealpath, you can be prepared to seize every opportunity. Schedule a demo to learn more about AI Extract and how Dealpath can prepare your data for future AI innovations.

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The post Introducing AI Extract appeared first on Dealpath.

Deal management software has unlocked a vital competitive advantage for homebuilders in today’s digital universe. To manage risk and seize opportunities, homebuilders must be equipped to collaborate and make decisions in real time.

In this blog post, we’ll outline how deal management software supports homebuilders at every stage in the community development lifecycle by building operational efficiencies and enhancing data-driven precision. 

Manage the Community Development Lifecycle in One Platform

As projects enter new phases and change hands, the sheer volume of data and information to consider is overwhelming. Your firm needs an easy way to capture and memorialize information. 

Managing the complete process, from the moment you identify a potential site in the market to delivery, creates a hub for institutional knowledge. Consequently, your firm can rely on one source of truth to prioritize tasks and view the latest updates and track critical dates like the end of due diligence, PSA execution, target close date, actual close date, non-refundable dates and many more.

Capture Potential Sites for Land Acquisition Across Target Markets

If new opportunities for homebuilding communities are still in spreadsheet silos, then there’s a better way.

Deal management software acts as a repository for potential sites as you scour target markets. Adding each site you find creates an actionable proprietary database, supporting smarter, data-driven decisions and memorializing critical details. At any point in the future, your firm can surface every site you’ve historically considered in seconds, helping you to revisit past opportunities and act on market intelligence.

Streamline Processes in Lot Investment Committee Meetings

Capturing every potential site in one place yields decisive efficiencies when it comes time to pitch opportunities to stakeholders and receive approval. 

As you prioritize opportunities in lot investment committee meetings, your team can seamlessly point to data-driven evidence to support these decisions. Comparing apples to apples based on the unit count, gross margins, lot types and more eliminates the need to circle back. 

Instead, your team can present empirical evidence to support your thesis and drive real-time decision making. After making a decision, memorialize the details in Dealpath.

Simplify Feasibility Analyses

Projecting returns to ensure the deal pencils can be challenging when financials are siloed.

As your firm sources and aggregates this financial data, updated figures can be stored in a source of truth your entire team can trust. When it comes time to pull data like construction costs, community costs, insurance and other data for feasibility analyses, there are no doubts about accuracy. Centralizing historical data in a proprietary deal database also helps teams gain broader market context and enhance precision with relevant comparables.

When your feasibility analysis yields questionable results, deepen your analysis by comparing underwriting model scenarios. Teams rely on Dealpath’s underwriting model comparison tool to understand how return profiles change as market conditions might evolve based on various financial scenarios. With this lens as part of your evaluation, you can ensure the deal will pencil out even in the event of, say, a mild decline in job creation.

Never Drop Another Ball During Due Diligence

Regional investment strategies complicate firmwide operating procedures across disparate business units, but there are ways to enforce cohesion and rigor. 

Once a deal reaches diligence, checking every box must become a top priority. Automating, managing and tracking standardized, role-based workflows in deal management software creates accountability, preventing homebuilders from missing deadlines. With all your deals tracked in one place, you can better manage risk and always track ahead of targets.

Track Entitlement Requests Across Regions 

Before a single shovel hits the ground, each community site must receive the correct entitlement. Unfortunately, though, siloed communication with local governments makes this challenging to manage. 

That’s why Dealpath’s centralized repository simplifies how teams memorialize property details and files. After a deal closes, teams can track information like which sites have received entitlements, have been declined, and other details. Standardizing these requests creates a seamless, scalable process, eliminating logistical nightmares.

Creating Transparency From Site Selection to Delivery

Between prospecting for new opportunities and selling the first home, your entire organization needs seamless visibility into deal progress. The traditional method of working–emails and spreadsheets–won’t suffice in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Centralizing all of this information in Dealpath’s deal management platform offers your firm the transparency modern organizations need for efficient, data-driven scalability. For example, after hearing about a lucrative deal, senior management may be eager to check in on entitlement progress. Or, once a deal closes, accounting teams might be interested in verifying details like the address, purchase price, and more. 

Whether you’re looking to verify details in the midst of the deal or more easily share information with downstream teams, deal management software acts as the centralized hub your team needs to collaborate in lockstep.

Boost Speed to Market With Deal Management Software

From comprehensive visibility at every stage to enhancing data-driven investment decisions, deal management software modernizes the homebuilding lifecycle. To learn more about how homebuilders and developers simplify, standardize and scale project management, download our eBook.

The post Optimize the Homebuilding Lifecycle in One Source of Truth appeared first on Dealpath.

But fractured communication has hidden costs. People are left out of the loop, inadvertently make decisions using out-of-date data, and it can take days to answer simple questions. 

Our new Conversations feature, currently in beta and scheduled for release later in Q1, embeds discussion directly in your deal database, making collaboration more efficient.

Centralize Data and Discussion in a Single Source of Truth 

The first step to solving collaboration problems is to centralize data in a single system like Dealpath that allows you to manage the CRE deal lifecycle from beginning to end. This ensures everyone is working from the same, up-to-date information and your team can focus on making critical strategic decisions. 

Now, with Conversations, you can bring discussion into Dealpath as well. Rather than switching contexts and discussing your deals in an email, meeting, or chat application, you can have discussions directly in Dealpath in the context of the data. Not only are discussions more productive, but both data and discussion are memorialized together in the same source of truth.

Comment on Specific Data Points

Conversations makes discussions more productive by allowing you to comment directly on specific data points in Dealpath. This means collaboration takes place right alongside the data you’re discussing.

And if a data point changes as a result of a conversation, that change will be recorded in the comment thread, so everyone can understand how deal data has evolved.

Transparency for the Entire Deal Team

Everyone with access to a particular view in Dealpath can see the Conversations there. That means you don’t need to be cc’d on that email or invited to that meeting in order to stay in the loop. And when you’re reviewing old deals, the context is all right there. 

Collaboration Tools Everyone Is Comfortable With

Conversations utilizes collaboration elements your team is already familiar with, so onboarding everyone is easy: 

• Threaded discussions to keep conversations organized
• @ mentions to tag specific colleagues
• Blockquotes to make it clear when you’re citing something 
• Email notifications to keep up to date 

How You Can Use Conversations

There are endless ways that your team can utilize Conversations, but here are a few common scenarios where the new feature might be useful.  

Deal Team Collaboration 

Members of the deal team can use Conversations to finalize data and ready a deal for presentation to executives. As they deliberate on initial underwriting, analysts and associates can discuss assumptions with their colleagues and ask for context around specific numbers.

Drafting Documents and Finalizing Data for Presentation

As the deal team finalizes documents for presentation, Conversations can help them make revisions quickly, without having to provide context in another channel. This revision process is also documented in case you need to reference anything later. 

Deal Review by Executives

Executives can use Conversations to ask questions about a deal directly in the context of the deal data. For example, if they have questions coming out of a Management Committee meeting, they can leave comments on the Memo in Dealpath and ask the deal team about the thinking behind specific numbers.

New Hire Onboarding

Conversations also memorializes discussion around a particular deal alongside the data. That means new hires can ramp quickly by getting all the context they need about a particular deal right in Dealpath. 

Supercharge Collaboration With Centralized Conversations in Dealpath

Schedule a meeting to learn more about Conversations and how Dealpath can streamline your processes.

The post Introducing Conversations: Bring Discussion Into Dealpath appeared first on Dealpath.

2023 drove the commercial real estate industry to reconsider their investment strategies by strengthening data-driven decision making, reducing manual work to prioritize impact, and upleveling risk management.

Throughout 2023, we invested tens of millions in product development, orienting our product roadmap and our team of 50+ Silicon Valley engineers to solve for these challenges by helping our customers:

• Elevate firmwide visibility into deal pipeline and investment performance
• Improve operational efficiencies by automating repeatable tasks
• Strengthen underwriting with a clearer view into how market conditions impact performance

Read on to learn about the most impactful new features that make Dealpath the real estate industry’s most trusted deal management solution.

Jump to:

• Newly Enhanced Comps Database
• Streamlined Model Comparison
• Automated Data Ingestion
• Integrated Document Creation
• Tools for Debt and Asset Teams
• Dealpath Mobile
• Approval Tracking
• AI-Powered Search
• Conversations & Reporting Dashboards (Coming Soon)
• AI-Powered Investment Summary & Memo Generation (Coming Soon)
• Supporting Institutional Investors Across the Globe

Looking Back on Innovations and New Releases in 2023

Newly Enhanced Comps Database

Referencing sales comps is an essential part of your deal evaluation process, so it shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming. The more streamlined your comps sourcing process is, the faster you can underwrite and prioritize the best deals.

We enhanced Comps in Dealpath in 2023, enabling users to leverage existing properties and historical deals to create comps for more informed decisions. Every Comp you create becomes part of a proprietary database aggregating your team’s unique market intelligence for an unrivaled competitive edge. 

Learn how to build a CRE comps database with OMs

Streamlined Model Comparison

Even if your team has financial modeling down to a science, it’s hard to make informed decisions without visibility into how return profiles change with market conditions.

Dealpath’s easy-to-use model comparison tool helps teams quickly identify which deals pencil out, even if the most challenging scenario comes to fruition.

Every model version can be viewed, filtered and sorted by milestone, creator, date and more, making it clear which scenarios are being compared and which information is most up-to-date. Hand-pick the comparison metrics, dashboards and mappings for each property type for a focused and curated underwriting process.

Automated Data Ingestion

Dealpath Data Ingestion (DDI) gives teams a streamlined and effortless way to capture new deals in Dealpath, taking the strain of cumbersome manual data entry off of your already limited resources.

As you receive new listings, DDI eliminates manual, time-consuming work and seamlessly creates new pipeline opportunities. This means you can prioritize deal analysis while building a proprietary deal database to help inform the most important investment decisions. 

In 2023, we introduced a DDI dashboard, giving teams an easy jumping-off point to track and kickstart analysis on all the deals that come across their desk–whether they become viable opportunities or simply market intelligence. A new version of DDI, supercharged by AI, is currently in beta testing with plans for general release to existing customers early next year. 

Schedule a meeting to learn more and join the beta

Integrated Document Creation

Document creation is an essential part of the day-to-day work of commercial real estate teams. Documents must be professional, include company colors and logos and, most importantly, be accurate when presented to internal and external stakeholders. But creating them is time-consuming–especially when you have to enter data points one-by-one.

Dealpath’s add-in for Microsoft Word enables teams to instantly pull Dealpath data like asking price, IRR and more into documents like LOIs, IC memos and PSAs without spending time on manual entry or double-checking accuracy. 

Learn 5 CRE document types you can streamline with Dealpath for Word

Tools for Debt and Asset Teams

We expanded Dealpath’s capabilities for debt investment teams, allowing for further customization, tracking and reporting of various loan types. This provides even deeper insight into your debt pipeline, particularly when various debt instruments are part of the same transaction.

We also introduced more tools to support the transfer of knowledge from deal teams to asset management teams, further breaking down data silos and preserving accurate historical reporting for all transactions.

Learn how to harness proprietary data to inform debt investment decisions

Dealpath Mobile

At the beginning of the year, the newest version of the Dealpath mobile app was released, enabling on-the-go decision making with data at your fingertips. That means no more waiting to get to a computer to enter new deals, make key updates to in-flight projects or pull up valuable market data.

Learn more about on-the-go dealmaking with Dealpath Mobile

Approval Tracking

A streamlined approval process is essential for moving quickly on the right deals and managing risk at scale, so we introduced enhancements that give approvers more contextual data at their fingertips for mission-critical decisions. This includes deal summaries and approval comments that become part of an automated record the moment the approval process is complete, creating a zero-effort audit trail.

Learn how to request, approve and track tasks in Dealpath

AI-Powered Search

First launched in 2022, Power Search in Dealpath leverages machine learning technology to put everything that was once frustratingly unsearchable or difficult to find at your fingertips, with recent AI-powered enhancements. Instantly surface the most accurate results within your deal database, including text within images and PDF documents, to maximize time savings with a smart search interface.

Learn how to surface relevant deals and information with Power Search in Dealpath

Conversations & Reporting Dashboards (Coming Soon)

Arriving early in 2024, conversations will help teams have a focused dialogue about a particular data point or aspect of a given deal, while reporting dashboards will provide even more sophisticated visualizations of pipeline and investment performance.

AI-Powered Investment Summary & Memo Generation (In Development)

Fueled by the contents of an OM or flyer, users will soon be able to generate a clear, concise deal summary highlighting the merits and risks of a deal to rapidly identify if the deal is aligned to the investment strategy.

Schedule a meeting to learn more

Supporting Institutional Investors Across the Globe

Our commitment to ongoing product innovation has yielded demonstrable results, including thousands of new users and expansions across hundreds of accounts. The Dealpath Leadership Team traveled to Dallas, Toronto, London, San Francisco and New York for roundtable discussions on the future of AI-powered real estate investment management to inform our product roadmap.

In addition to innovating new solutions for existing clients like Principal Real Estate, Nuveen Real Estate, Bridge Investment Group, UBS and other top institutional investors, we were proud to welcome a groundswell of new clients. 

In 2023 alone, we completed over 75 unique implementations for institutional clients, including CBRE Investment Management, Gaw Capital, LaSalle Investment Management, DWS, Newmark, Sumitomo, Essex Property Trust, and Centurion, with headquarters ranging from Milan, Italy, to Toronto, Canada, to the U.K., and across over 40 cities in the U.S.

Each client received a bespoke configuration, and included professional consulting services to create alignment with key goals, KPIs and investment strategies. Following this implementation, these customers continue to enjoy white-glove customer service from our team of 20+ customer success professionals based in North America that specialize in CRE. Our post-implementation NPS score was 70.

Dealpath proudly supports 7 of the top 10 institutional investors globally, and is ranked the #1 Real Estate Deal and Portfolio Management Solution for:

• Acquisitions
• Dispositions
• Development
• Loan Origination

Industry Awards & Office Expansions

Over the course of the year, Dealpath and its leadership team continued to receive broad recognition for category-defining solutions that have transformed the real estate investment management industry, including:

• Built In 50 Best Startups to Work for In San Francisco 2023
• Business Insider Hottest Proptech List
• Connect CRE Next Generation Awards 
• Crain’s Notable Leaders in Real Estate
• GlobeSt. Best Places to Work 2023
• GlobeSt. Tech Influencers 2023
• NYREJ Women in Real Estate Spotlight 
• Proptech Breakthrough Awards
• Realcomm Digie Awards 
• San Francisco Business Times Largest Greater Bay Area Proptech Companies

We also opened new, expanded offices in New York, Toronto and Austin, in addition to our San Francisco headquarters.

Schedule a Meeting About the Future of AI-Powered Deal Management

From OM ingestion to portfolio management, Dealpath offers real estate investment managers the most innovative suite of end-to-end tools to build operational efficiencies and supercharge data-driven decision making. To modernize your firm’s processes and maximize value creation in 2024, schedule a meeting.

The post Dealpath’s 2023 Year In Review: AI, Precision & Efficiency appeared first on Dealpath.

In today’s digital-first world of proptech, emails, spreadsheets and physical documents simply can’t offer the accuracy or agility required by modern deal teams. Speed, precision and scale can make the difference between capturing emerging opportunities and following the market’s lead. Real estate deal management software is key to creating–and defending–your competitive advantage by surfacing profitable opportunities and managing risk with rigor.

Firms that take an opportunity now to digitize processes and build proprietary deal databases are positioned to win as opportunities emerge. In this blog post, we’ll explore why real estate deal management software has become the gold standard for firmwide alignment and data-driven conviction.

What Is Deal Management Software in Commercial Real Estate?

Real estate deal management software acts as a command center for institutional deal teams to streamline collaboration and inform decision making from sourcing through pipeline tracking, due diligence, and closing.

As your firm screens new deals, you can build a proprietary deal database of market intelligence to support future decisions, as well as report on investment activity with modern sophistication.

Without a dedicated real estate investment software solution, many firms have historically cobbled together Excel checklists, file storage platforms, and generic project management tools to manage acquisitions, development and financing deals. However, highly paid team members can make a stronger impact by minimizing time spent on admin tasks in favor of more strategic work. 

Aligned around one source of truth, firms can manage their workflows in one centralized place, maximizing efficiency and optimizing risk management.

By adopting Dealpath, the first and leading real estate deal management software, our clients have achieved meaningful efficiencies, such as streamlining ad-hoc report creation, capturing a higher volume of deal data and market intelligence, and streamlining collaboration across their pipelines.  

1. Improve Operational Efficiency & Collaboration With Real Estate Deal Management Software

Centralizing deal data and information in one command center eliminates much of the manual data entry and analysis that previously took a toll on professionals at all levels. Deal management software delivers the efficiency your firm needs to remain competitive with automation and repeatability.

Eliminate Manual Data Entry

From source through close, deal management software builds efficiency by eliminating manual data entry, creating additional bandwidth for higher-impact work.

AI-powered deal ingestion adds deals directly to the top of the funnel, helping your firm choose whether to pass immediately or evaluate the deal under a closer lens. Centralized data also streamlines data entry when creating documents like LOIs and IC memos.

Centralized Document Management & Communication

Siloed information that can only be accessed by owners or requested via email prolongs investment processes. Real estate deal management software centralizes all deal data, information and documents in one command center to break down these silos. As deals progress, deal teams can add comments, creating valuable context about decision logic months or years later.

Consequently, anyone in the organization–including downstream teams like portfolio and asset management–can access the latest information with ease.

Configurable, Collaborative & Automated Workflows

Why recreate a checklist for each new deal when you can kickstart underwriting? Automating role-based workflows in Dealpath ensures that teams waste no time with manual delegation, pushing deals to the right stakeholders while simplifying approvals. Robust deal management solutions offer direct access to third parties, like environmental and legal consultants, to attach relevant documents or share updates.

Recreating your unique workflows in Dealpath adds institutional rigor to your process, optimizing risk management.

2. Enhance Real-Time Pipeline Visibility

To make efficient, data-driven investment decisions, your firm must be able to systematically identify and prioritize profitable deals that match your target risk profile. Real estate deal management software creates the visibility required by stakeholders at all levels to uncover these opportunities and make informed decisions with intuitive data analytics and automated reporting.

View All Deal Details in One Centralized Hub

Whether you’re showing the deal to the Managing Director for the first time or pitching the IC, you can’t risk showing outdated information. Deal management software centralizes all relevant information in one hub, from financial metrics to relevant comparables and beyond. Any stakeholders, from IC members to portfolio managers seeking details after closing, can find the information they need with confidence in its accuracy–even by searching deal details that might be inside an OM.

Manage Tasks and Critical Dates for Every Real Estate Deal in Your Pipeline

For enterprise deal teams, staying abreast of every critical date is vital for risk management. Managing tasks in real estate deal management software creates visibility into ownership, preventing costly mistakes and setbacks. Critical date reports can illustrate upcoming deadlines on the horizon, while staffing workload reports detail which team members might have additional bandwidth or consistently miss target deadlines.

Track the Latest Updates in a Firmwide Source of Truth

Whether a deal is in the initial stages of underwriting, the late stages of due diligence or nearing closing, deal teams must be able to find the latest updates. Relying on a firmwide source of truth ensures that, as deals progress, all team members have real-time visibility into completed and remaining tasks. Approval audit trails can also help managers and executives to better manage risk.

Automated, Visualized Real Estate Deal Management Reporting

Automated, configurable reporting ensures that all stakeholders in your organization are apprised of pipeline activity, all without distracting analysts from high-impact work. Bespoke reporting allows deal teams to see where their pipelines stand from a 15,000 foot view or through a more granular lens, such as a particular market, sector or broker source.

Relevant, timely reports inform decisions about which deals to prioritize based on the latest updates.

Measure Exposure in Seconds

The next time a lender hits the headlines, you won’t want to wait to understand the impact on your portfolio. Reporting on deals with a particular lender, sponsor or in a specific market can help your firm measure exposure and react before the dust settles.

3. Unlock Your Competitive Data Advantage

Seamlessly capturing unprecedented volumes of data and information and activating intelligence with real-time data analytics positions your firm with a competitive edge, whether you’re waiting for the right moment or actively deploying capital.

Capture Volumes of Market Intelligence

Seamless, AI-powered data ingestion empowers your firm to scale deal screenings with ease. Even if you pass immediately, every deal you capture carries perpetual value in the form of a comparable, informing future decisions. Consequently, you can see every deal in your target markets to unlock greater precision–all without increasing headcount or workload for existing team members.

Slice and Dice Data to Analyze Deals With Speed and Precision

When a new opportunity arises, analysts shouldn’t have to scramble through internal folders and communication channels to pinpoint historical comps. Real estate deal management software puts data at your fingertips in the form of data analytics. Rather than sifting through spreadsheets to compare cap rates, analysts can surface comparables and validate underwriting assumptions by slicing and dicing data.

Systematize Data-Driven Decision Making

Gone are the days where questions posed by the investment committee delay time-sensitive decisions while data is compiled manually. Deal management software ensures that your firm can answer vital stakeholder questions in the moment by surfacing comparables and generating reports immediately. Consequently, you can support every decision with proprietary market intelligence.

17 CRE Investment Questions Your Data Can (Finally) Answer

To outperform the competition and move at digital speed, real estate investment managers must make decisions that are grounded in–not simply supported by–data. Download this guide to learn just a few examples of how CRE investment managers can turn data into answers with unprecedented speed, precision and scale with deal management software.

The post 3 Reasons to Adopt Real Estate Deal Management Software appeared first on Dealpath.

Rapid, granular data insights are now table stakes in the highly competitive CRE industry. Beyond real-time analytics and reporting, however, one largely untapped channel to fuel competitive intelligence is dead deal analysis. 

In this blog post, we’ll outline why your firm must review dead deal reports, including 5 otherworldly insights to analyze performance and reanimate your strategy.

What Is a Dead Deal Analysis Report?

As your firm audits pipeline performance to uncover which sectors saw supernatural success and where skeletons are hiding in the closet, every data point matters. Centralizing deal information in a deal management platform like Dealpath creates the opportunity to uncover unique, real-time insights.

In partnering with hundreds of CRE firms across nearly every sector and vertical, we’ve empowered industry leaders to better inform their strategies with dead deal analysis reporting. Dead deal reports break down outcomes based on factors like target market, pricing misalignment, stage when marked dead, and more. In the next generation of AI-powered CRE investment, intelligence like this is foundational to your competitive advantage.

Armed with these learnings, your firm can bewitch its strategy by straying away from low-performing verticals, doubling down on high-performing markets, or fixing bottlenecks. While dead deal reports can be configured to meet your unique needs, these are some of the most popular insights to learn from dead deal analysis.

5 Haunting Insights to Learn From Dead Deal Analysis Reports

1. There Are Patterns in Deal Breakers

From inadequate foot traffic to financials that don’t pencil, numerous factors can send a deal to the graveyard. Dead deal reports offer a unique opportunity to learn from common themes in the reasons that deals died.

Were there consistent issues around pricing, the condition of the property, financing, or counterparties? Understanding patterns can help you refine these criteria to improve future deal sourcing. For example, uncovering that deals sourced from a particular broker frequently die might indicate the need to strengthen relationships with other brokers that source more lucrative deals.

2. You Need a More Rigorous Deal Evaluation Process

The majority of your deals are bound to die as they progress through the funnel. When a high percentage of deals die in a certain stage, though, don’t scream bloody murder.

Dead deal analysis reports can also help your firm to assess where additional rigor might be needed throughout the evaluation process. If a significant number of deals die due to surprises that surface in diligence, for example, then it might indicate a need to surface financial risk earlier on by adding rigor during screening. Tracking when deals die (and if there’s a shared reason) can highlight where–and why–your evaluation process needs strengthening.

3. Market Conditions Are Changing

Don’t scream like a banshee when your late-stage pipeline starts to feel like a ghost town.

Dead deal analysis reports also provide a unique lens into broader market trends, such as valuations, cap rates, and other metrics. Material changes in deal flow patterns can be a telling signal of evolving market conditions. 

If your firm is closing fewer deals than in recent history, look to other sources of truth to better understand recent trends. For example, try validating this analysis by viewing cap rates over time in the same submarket across a cohort of deals in Dealpath.

4. Past Deals May Be Ready for a Follow-Up

Is it time to raise a particular deal from the dead?

Auditing dead deal reports can surface opportunities to revive a deal as conditions change. For example, if the office sector improves performance in suburban markets,a dead deal might be worth reconsidering. Dead deals in Dealpath carry the unique benefit of a historical record, meaning your team can kickstart outreach and re-evaluation with a wealth of existing information.

After all, your next lucrative deal could be one buried deep in the graveyard.

5. Close Rates in Particular Submarkets

You don’t need a ouija board to learn how your firm can close more deals. Instead, simply monitor your close rate in key target markets on a dead deal report. 

Tracking your pipeline in a centralized, cloud-based system creates a record of every deal you review, including the percentage that ultimately close. A high close rate might indicate that it makes sense to source more deals in that particular submarket. Conversely, a low close rate might trigger a shift in strategy or resource allocation.

Benchmarking close rate for each stage of your pipeline can reveal where deals are stalling out. After discovering initial benchmarks, set a target close rate, diligently track it, and evaluate steps to align conversion rates to your targets through each stage. 

An objective close rate is vital for keeping your deal sourcing and evaluation process sharply focused.

17 CRE Investment Questions Your Data Can (Finally) Answer

To outperform the competition and move at digital speed, real estate investment managers must make decisions that are grounded in–not simply supported by–data.

Download our white paper to learn just a few examples of how CRE investment managers can turn data into answers with unprecedented speed, precision and scale with deal management software.

The post Night of the Living Data: 5 Dead Deal Report Insights appeared first on Dealpath.

Investor intuition and market knowledge are invaluable as your firm evaluates deals, but data must be the bedrock of multi-million dollar investment decisions. Every real estate offering memorandum (OM) you review can add value to your investment decision-making–and more broadly, your institutional data advantage– in the form of a commercial real estate comparable, or comp. 

Deal teams are tapping into unprecedented insights through proprietary deal databases to outperform the competition in the new real estate game.

Read on to learn how investment managers seamlessly harvest comparables through powerful data analytics and artificial intelligence in real estate investment software.

Jump to:

• Building a Database of Commercial Real Estate Comparables With OMs
• How to Compare New Deals Against Relevant Comps in Dealpath
• What Are Real Estate Offering Memorandums (OMs)?
• What Are Commercial Real Estate Comps?
• What Data Should Be Included in Commercial Real Estate Comps?

Building a Database of Commercial Real Estate Comparables From OMs

Prior to the advent of today’s purpose-built technology, comparable data stored in spreadsheets or shared drives was challenging to tap into, often requiring teams to source new comps as opportunities arise. Now, deal management software has become the gold standard for capturing relevant real estate comp data, enabling seamless analysis.

Ingesting new deals into your deal management platform programmatically builds institutional market expertise with every new opportunity you review. Even deals that your firm immediately passes on can add significant value for benchmarking down the road. Relying on an AI-powered platform like Dealpath Data Ingestion ensures that you can capture this intelligence efficiently and accurately, without draining bandwidth. 

As you receive flyers from brokers, your deal management software should offer a way to efficiently upload them. The more opportunities you review, the greater your competitive advantage against firms making bets in similar markets. 

When choosing a deal management platform to support data-driven analyses with comps, ensure that your provider has a strong reputation, long runway and can deliver the accuracy required by your firm.

How to Compare New Deals Against Relevant Comps in Dealpath

Searchable analytics helps investors find answers to their questions faster and with stronger precision. Whether you’re screening a new deal that just came across your desk for the first time or pulling data to support your thesis in an Investment Committee meeting, Dealpath makes it easy to compare apples to apples.

Search within your own proprietary database for comps in the same market as your new deal, then compare them across criteria like price, size, cap rate and more. You can even customize which data is compared based on the asset type, selecting different criteria for multifamily, industrial and other property types based on your strategy.

For example, an industrial-focused firm managing deals in Dealpath considering an acquisition in Dallas could add comps from past “industrial” deals in “Dallas” to access historical data. After a few simple clicks, you could find everything you need to know about recent deals and past opportunities.

What Are Real Estate Offering Memorandums (OMs)?

A commercial real estate offering memorandum, or OM, is a legal document prepared by brokers to inform prospective buyers about a seller’s property. Real estate OMs provide all of the information buyers need to determine if the deal is worth pursuit. Typically, OMs include:

• A brief summary of the key points investors need to know about a property’s location, financials and more
• A description of the property, including the asset class, zoning classifications, demographic details, and pertinent operational details
• Breakdown of current tenants, including rent rolls, lease expirations and more
• Critical financial details such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, investor distribution schedules, IRR and more
• Return summaries predicated on varying assumptions
• Property management stakeholder profiles
• Legal information, such as participation requirements and confidentiality agreements
• Photographs of the property to help investors understand the asset
• Local maps to show investors the property’s location and its proximity to amenities and other hotspots 
• Lease and sale comparables to provide financial benchmarks for prospective buyers

For the seller, real estate offering memorandums are a fast, simple way to distribute information about a property listed on the market. For potential buyers, OMs help investors to quickly and easily determine if the property is worth pursuing.

As previously mentioned, each real estate OM also adds endless value in the form of comparables and data analytics.

What Are Commercial Real Estate Comps?

Also called comparables, commercial real estate comps provide investors with market intelligence in the form of data, such as prices on similar deals. Comps help investment deal teams to set internal and external benchmarks when screening and underwriting pipeline deals. Consequently, investors can confidently develop a thesis and execute with conviction.

There are two types of commercial real estate comps: sales comps and lease comps. Sales comps are based on recent pricing or sales data, and help investors to learn how a property’s price compares to market value. Leasing comps, on the other hand, are used by asset management teams to project potential ROI. In this blog post, we focus mainly on the value sales comps deliver to investors.

Comps from the same sub-market as a pipeline deal can yield tremendous insight when gauging how a deal is priced according to current market conditions. The closer two properties are when it comes to their size, age, quality, amenities and other variables, the more insight comps lend. However, it’s not uncommon for investors to adjust prices after accounting for size, age or other discrepancies.

What Data Should Be Included in Commercial Real Estate Comps?

Commercial real estate comps are powerful tools, but only when they include data relevant to investment decisions. For maximum value during the screening process, real estate comparables should include:

• The property’s address
• The property’s sale price
• The cap rate
• The projected IRR
• The net operating income
• The asset class or property type
• The names of the firms that bought and sold the property
• The date of the transaction
• The size of the building
• Operational costs

Paid third-party data can prove useful, with some caveats. These datasets are often outdated by the time they are called into question, limiting their utility.

Enter the Next Generation of Investment Performance With AI-Powered Deal Management

Every deal your firm reviews should add perpetual value in the form of competitive intelligence. To learn how AI-powered Dealpath Data Ingestion (DDI) can empower your firm to kickstart underwriting, eliminate manual data entry and grow your proprietary deal database, contact us.

The post How to Build a Commercial Real Estate Comps Database With OMs [Guide] appeared first on Dealpath.

Before you can prioritize the most work on your plate, you need to know which deals require your attention. However, without the right information, prioritizing can become a task in and of itself.

Dealpath’s custom notifications feature allows you to easily stay up-to-date on every new deal, update and task that matters–potentially eliminating meetings while reducing manual communication. Read on to learn how your firm can automate communications and boost team-wide transparency with custom notifications in Dealpath.

Custom Notifications: A Smarter Way to Notify Team Members of Deal Progression

Staying abreast of real-time deal updates is the only way to tackle high-priority deals at the earliest opportunity or inform your work based on deal progress. Now, you can receive actionable updates on critical deals directly from your inbox. 

Custom notifications in Dealpath will alert you of important progress on deals that matter to you based on defined criteria. Whenever a deal reaches a certain stage or meets other criteria, you’ll receive an email notification. 

5 Ways You Can Skip Meetings and Eliminate Emails With Custom Notifications

Automating deal notifications further reduces manual communication and meeting cadences, bringing even greater efficiencies to your team. Instead of emailing, or even commenting, you can simply push deals through workflows based on your pipeline processes, with confidence that the alert will reach the right team member.

1. Alert Team Members When It’s Time to Start Working Deals

As an acquisitions associate, for example, you may not need to see live updates for every file uploaded during underwriting. You would, however, want to know when underwriting is complete and the deal is ready for a more thorough evaluation. Similarly, the VP of Acquisitions may want to know precisely when an associate has finished writing the IC memo. 

Now, team members can opt to receive push notifications as these milestones are completed, avoiding manual communication and unnecessary delays.

2. Surface New Opportunities Matching Certain Criteria to Stakeholders

Beyond milestone alerts, custom notifications also enable stakeholders within your firm to stay up-to-date on certain types of deals. For example, a Chief Investment Officer may only want early-stage updates on deals in highly competitive verticals, like industrial. Custom notifications ensure that stakeholders are aware of any new opportunities they might consider noteworthy. 

Or, an Investment Committee member might want to know if a deal of a certain size reaches the LOI stage. Additionally, fund managers are naturally eager to see which deals are allocated to their funds.

3. Notify Stakeholders When Critical Dates Are 30 Days Away

As certain critical dates approach, stakeholders will want to ensure that execution is on track. Receiving an alert 30 days prior to, for example, the construction start date, offers enough time to check in on the deal or project status, reallocate resources to meet deadlines, and simply stay apprised of progress. 

Now, deal teams can receive these updates in real time, preventing the need for protracted project update meetings–and accelerating responses to real–time changes.

4. The Closing Date (or Another Critical Date) Changes 

Similarly, changes in critical dates could indicate a priority shift for both team members and stakeholders. For example, a change in the closing date on one particular deal might cause certain deal team members to shift their focus to another deal. To remain aligned, deal team members may need to communicate that update to third parties.

In other cases, critical date change notifications might inform a stakeholder that the closing is off schedule, thereby changing a recently updated capital deployment forecast. Consequently, stakeholders would receive these updates without waiting for a pipeline update.

5. Instantly Know When a Deal Closes

Finally, receiving a custom notification of a deal closing can streamline multiple communication channels for deal teams. 

First, accounting teams can make changes to reconcile their systems based on the closing, like updating their ERP with new building information. Deal team leaders can celebrate their successes, while turning their attention to the next highest priority. Once the transaction closes, senior management can provide capital deployment updates to investors. Senior management can also provide updates to investors about capital deployment and closed transactions.

How It Works: Configure Rules Based on Deal Stage & Other Custom Fields

Custom notifications can be configured via rules based on the deal type, deal status or any other field you may want to track. The subject line and email content can be customized to help stakeholders instantly view updates on critical deals directly from their inboxes.

Learn More About Custom Notifications

If your firm is already managing its pipeline on Dealpath, please reach out to your customer success manager to learn more about configuring this new feature.

To learn more about custom notifications and other ways your deal team can build efficiencies in Dealpath, request a demo.

The post 5 Ways to Eliminate Emails and Skip Meetings With Custom Notifications appeared first on Dealpath.

Facing shipping times as long as three years for large transformers, one biotech REIT paused development on some projects in an effort to cut construction spending by $250M. Eager to capitalize on new opportunities amidst an AI boom, tech companies like Microsoft are now prioritizing contracts with developers equipped to navigate these supply chain woes. 

In this blog post, we’ll detail how developers are centralizing project costs and timelines in Dealpath, real estate’s leading deal management platform, to create actionable intelligence, surface process improvements and inform business strategy.

Capture Project Information in One Centralized Hub

The traditional method for managing development projects–emailing updates and spreadsheet-based timelines–made turning information into insights challenging. The emergence of deal management platforms, however, has changed the real estate development process. Now, developers can react to evolving market conditions in real time and with greater clarity by tracking and managing projects in one place.

From sourcing to project delivery, development teams collaborate in lockstep in Dealpath by executing workflows and capturing information, including updates related to material costs and deliveries, in one source of truth. Consequently, as costs and material delivery timelines change, stakeholders at all levels can turn to Dealpath for data-driven insights on these challenges and how to overcome them.

Real estate development software can position your business to react to changing market conditions with greater agility.

1. Understand Cost and Timeline Variance

Almost all vendor transactions begin with cost and delivery estimations, but in today’s challenging market, it’s not uncommon for these to fall by the wayside. So, how much time should you really be spending on them? 

While your firm may not have control over real estate supply chains, you can track cost and delivery timelines in Dealpath to react with greater speed and precision. For example, tracking the projected and actual lumber delivery dates for your industrial project in Atlanta will ultimately help you understand these differentials, including how they vary by supplier. One 

After delivering the project, your team can look back on this data to see how it performed against projections, or look at multiple projects in aggregate to set benchmarks for reasonable market expectations. Similarly, you can also gain deeper insights into projected and actual costs. 

In Dealpath, your firm can enforce this process by assigning a cost projection task to the point of contact at the supplier as an external collaborator, taking this admin work off your team’s plate.

Consequently, stakeholders within your firm can gain a clearer picture of how projections perform against actuals. Tracking cost differentials can also help your firm understand the impact on returns and periodic cash flows. You might even gain insight into how a delayed material delivery–otherwise a simple blip on the radar–influenced the project timeline.

Additionally, you can leverage this intelligence in Dealpath to inform your development process in numerous ways.

2. Optimize Business Process and Streamline Delivery With More Accurate Timelines

Once you understand real estate supply chain timeline and cost trends across your development projects, there are numerous levers you can pull to better inform your process.

For example, the data could reflect that deliveries from a specific sheet metal supplier are, on average, six weeks late. In this case, you might benefit from an additional six weeks built into the construction timeline. If, in another scenario, costs are always higher than anticipated, then selecting another vendor could offset this risk.

Resetting timelines in Dealpath is as simple as adjusting the task date, which would trigger any linked due dates to fall six weeks later. For example, resetting the lumber delivery due date would adjust the dates for related tasks, such as construction, painting and final delivery. Consequently, your team can spend more time on project execution and less time on manual administrative tasks.

Closing the gap on real estate supply chains and cost projections can also carry broad benefits for leadership, helping stakeholders to more confidently forecast delivery dates.

3. Inform Business Strategy

In a perfect world, would your firm double down on the development projects that create the least friction and yield the highest returns? While deeper visibility into real estate supply chain and cost challenges can help you correct course on existing projects, it can also help you to be more strategic about the projects you elect to take on. Finally, you can answer the crucial question: which sectors and markets are least affected by cost and timeline fluctuations?

During an annual review, you might find that projects in the suburban Chicago industrial submarket are, on average, delivered 16 weeks late. In this hypothetical case, it might make sense to steer away from future projects in this sub-market. In another scenario, you could find that one nationwide supplier issues cost projections that are far more accurate than others, meaning it could prove beneficial to give them more business.

4 Tactics To Simplify, Standardize & Scale Development Projects

If it takes hours to wrangle multiple stakeholders to learn where projects stand, or deadlines slip through the cracks, there’s a better way to manage development projects. New technologies have empowered development teams to standardize workflows for scalable execution.

Download our eBook to learn best practices your firm can adopt to ensure stakeholder alignment, maximum efficiency and optimal returns.

The post 3 Tips to Conquer CRE Development Supply Chain Challenges in Dealpath appeared first on Dealpath.

Back in June, the Dealpath team hosted a webinar about how to maximize deal management results, from implementation to ROI. B2B software can be like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get, but it shouldn’t be–solutions should always yield clear, measurable value and momentum to help you accomplish defined goals. In this blog post, we’ll recap how to invest with the best long-term, goal-oriented deal management partnership and master change management. 

Don’t forget to watch the webinar on-demand to learn how your firm can achieve lasting, scalable and quantifiable deal management results. 

Results, Reputation, Runway: Research Solution Providers Upfront

The last thing you want in a solution is a short-lived or poorly executed solution, especially when that solution is shoring up your competitive advantage and helping you better manage multi-million dollar investment decisions. In the early stages of your evaluation, prioritize researching the reputation of the provider in question to ensure they’re qualified to partner with your business.

Has the real estate investment software provider helped other companies like yours to achieve measurable ROI? If not, deriving value that drives your bottom line–and is easily justifiable to senior management–could be challenging.

Is the software purpose-built for–with features that are informed by–commercial real estate firms like yours? Understanding the relationship of the solution provider within the broader context of the market can be telling. The more closely product development has been influenced by similar firms, the better positioned you’ll be to benefit from ongoing value as the provider responds to feedback, releases new features and your needs or strategies evolve. Providers that fail to capture the market majority–or are catching up–could miss valuable insight into how to best serve their clients.

Finally, based on these factors, consider the runway of the solution provider. Is the provider generating substantive cash flow, paired with VC-sourced funding, to support your needs for the long haul? Or, will they succumb to competitive pressures in a challenging market environment? Choosing a solution provider with reliable capital access and demonstrable longevity can offer the confidence needed to make this long-term decision.

Having created the deal management category in 2014, Dealpath is trusted by 7 of the top 10 institutional investors and recently secured a $43M series C funding round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

Look for a Goal-Oriented, Partner-Led Implementation Process

Whether you’re transitioning to a new deal management platform from another provider or spreadsheets and post-its, you need support to take things off the ground. After all, how can you achieve the results you set out to receive without guidance from a platform expert?

During the webinar, we reviewed Dealpath’s goal-oriented implementation process, from importing deal data, to workflow configuration, reporting automation, and more. We also discussed the value of Dealpath-led team trainings in successful change management as your firm works to enforce adoption. 

In the webinar, you’ll hear firsthand how Dealpath helped a top 10 investment manager eliminate manual data entry, break down silos and quickly analyze potential opportunities across various business lines.

Prioritize Ongoing Support as Strategies & Needs Evolve

In an increasingly dynamic commercial real estate market, the strategy you define today could vary dramatically from what conditions might dictate in 6 months. When evaluating providers, prioritize a consultative, ongoing partnership to tackle new challenges and goals as they emerge.

Dealpath’s Customer Success team routinely meets with clients to ensure they have the support and product expertise necessary to maximize results. In the webinar, one of our Senior Customer Success Managers discussed routine touchpoints.

First, all customers can participate in regularly scheduled cadence calls, which offer a forum to voice requests, concerns and for our team to share recent product updates. We also covered our semi-annual reviews to uncover opportunities for optimization, discuss highlights and adapt strategies as needed.

In the webinar, we highlighted how a Dealpath client cemented the platform as a firmwide source of truth, increasing team engagement by 400%.

Define Your Ideal Solution

You know there’s an opportunity to build operational efficiencies and strengthen your competitive advantage with deal management, but where do you start? 

For some deal teams, a firmwide initiative to centralize investment data might take priority. Others might prioritize real-time pipeline tracking or configurable closing workflows and approvals.

Regardless of your needs, be sure to seek out a solution provider with the expertise and diligence to translate your needs and goals into an attainable, revenue-driving solution. In a competitive market, you can’t afford to compromise on your process and strategy–which has driven your success–just to make room for software.

Watch the Webinar On-Demand to Learn More

Be sure to register for the on-demand webinar to learn more about how your firm can invest with the best long-term, goal-oriented partnership. 

To request a Dealpath demo, click here.

The post <strong>From Implementation to ROI: Dealpath Customer Success Webinar Recap</strong> appeared first on Dealpath.