The Propcast is hosted by Louisa Dickens, Co-Founder of LMRE, the leading Global PropTech recruiter and is brought to you in partnership with UK PropTech Association. The UK PropTech Association is a membership organization to drive the digital transformation of the property industry.

Quotes from the episode include the following:

“The past five or six months have been a catalyst for our industry’s digital transformation. Centralized data that is globally accessible has never been more important.” – Mike Sroka, Dealpath CEO

“Investing is a game of connecting the dots and whoever can connect the dots and tell the best picture and have an information advantage typically wins.” – John Fitzpatrick, Blackstone Managing Director

“Real estate is a local business and institutional capital is global. From the beginning, an assumption of ours is that this is global business and we have to build out a solution that works well for that dynamic asset class.” – Mike Sroka, Dealpath CEO

Hear the full episode of The Propcast and be sure to rate and review on Apple Podcasts!

The post Listen Now: The Propcast featuring Dealpath’s Mike Sroka appeared first on Dealpath.

Budgeting season often balloons into much more than just talking numbers on a spreadsheet. It reflects back to strategy, operational planning, and often ROI that you and your company are looking to measure.

So, we sought out an expert to help us think through the highs and lows of budget planning specifically for software solutions. Dipesh Shah is a former CIO (InvenTrust Properties Corp) and current consultant with his firm, New Roads Consulting. He detailed the biggest setbacks he sees with real estate firms looking to budget for and successfully implement new software solutions.

He broke down his recommendations into three main areas:

First, begin with your strategy. Budget decisions should stem from a broader business plan that the whole team can get behind.

Second, determine your plan for measuring success from the outset. Successful spending and implementation decisions have clearly identified outcomes.

Finally, accountability is key. Without a system for holding your team accountable, firms risk investing in tools that don’t ultimately get adopted by the team at scale.

Download the ‘Budgeting Season: How to Build Tech Into Your 2021 Plan’ to guide you through setting up for 2021!

The post How to Fit Tech Into Your Budget Planning appeared first on Dealpath.

BPM recently compiled a list of the top KPIs that real estate investors should consider and separated them into three categories:

1.     Speed

Patience may be a virtue, but in CRE investment, time is of the essence. KPIs such as ‘Hours per initial pursuit decision,’ ‘Days per approval,’ and ‘Days per closed deal’ can track the efficiency of your workflow and communication.

Investment firms are increasingly leveraging CRE technology to streamline their deal flow, and, ultimately, save time. Centralized deal information and pipeline tracking, along with well-engineered user-interfaces have shown to be some of the most effective methods to increase your deal speed.

2.     Accuracy

When evaluating multi-million-dollar real estate deals, investment teams have to work with accurate, up-to-date information at all times. Important metrics to track over time include ‘Number of versions per presentation,’ ‘Number of Internal Rejections,’ and ‘Total value change from initial underwriting to final offer.’

CRE investors and developers have more data than ever, but with more data come more opportunities for errors. Maintaining good data hygiene, following best practices for security, and working with reputable service providers will help maintain the integrity of your data.

3.     Adaptability

The commercial real estate market can be unpredictable at times. Financing rates and access to capital can fluctuate with the economic and political landscape. Adaptability is the key to remaining resilient in the face of a tumultuous environment. While adaptability can be difficult to quantify, the ‘Number of open APIs or connectors’ can serve as a valuable KPI.

In addition, investors should make checklists to evaluate their mobile capabilities and the UI of potential technology solutions. Features to look for should include integrations, mechanisms for collaboration, and a promising product roadmap.

We live in a data-driven age, and CRE investing is no exception. By tracking these KPIs and altering your strategy based on the results, you can optimize your investment portfolio and streamline your deal management process.

To read more about the top KPIs for savvy real estate investors, be sure to check out the full article by BPM.

The post The New KPIs for High-performance Real Estate Investors appeared first on Dealpath.

1. Prospecting – Properties received from broker relationships or researched independently that the firm may visit and perform light, initial underwriting on
2. Letter of Intent Submitted – Deals the firm submitted an offer on
3. Under Contract – Deals with an existing binding contract progressing through the underwriting, due diligence, and closing phases
4. Closed – Deals that a firm has successfully acquired (these properties typically move on to their the asset management team)
5. Dead – Deals the team prospected but did not move forward on for various reasons, moving to Dead after any stage of their pipeline
6. Tracking – Deals that the team may not be actively pursued, but are good to know for various reasons (building comparables, understanding market trends, etc.)

While deal statuses provide informative, high-level information on deals, effective pipelines should also include relevant deal and property information along with critical team deadlines. In order to compete for each deal, teams must consider tracking the call for offer dates, PSA execution deadlines, due diligence expiration dates, and closing dates. Including this data allows team members to easily see the most important metrics and analysis on deals, and gives investment teams the ability to quickly share information with executives who wish to understand the landscape of the deals the firm is participating in. For executives, it is critical to stay abreast of all the prospecting and closing activity as well as what deals are missed or passed on. This level of data awareness enables firms to identify consistent bottlenecks in their diligence process. Reducing these roadblocks inevitably leads to more effective deal execution,  which increases the pipeline, which then enables the firm to prospect and close more deals.

In our discussions with CRE firms who are looking for smarter ways to manage their pipeline, the two most frequently heard issues include pipeline collaboration and pipeline reconfiguration as their company evolves over time. The challenge with leveraging a static document to track and share information across a small or large team is that only one team member can edit the pipeline document at a time.  Duplicate versions of the same document lead to inefficiencies and information never making it to the appropriate party. Additionally, as firm’s processes and executives change over time, there’s no simple way to change the current information being tracked on the pipeline report. This leads to teams spending hours digging through supplemental spreadsheets to add historical data to their pipeline report, much of which is inaccurate.

These inefficiencies have been top of mind for us at Dealpath since we began building our platform, especially for CRE firms. We designed and constructed Dealpath on the foundation that enabling teams to effectively track their deal pipeline is the first necessary component to achieving success in closing the right deals for the firm. With Dealpath, customers are able to create a single or multiple personal or shared pipeline reports consisting of different information that they can effectively collaborate on from anywhere with their team. They’ve said goodbye to adding a “v2, v3, v4…” to the end of their excel document names and wondering if they are looking at the most up-to-date version. Additionally, firms can reconfigure their pipeline report by adding or removing data with just a few clicks as their needs change over time.

We’d love to hear from you to explore ways your team can adopt a pipeline tracking process that allows your firm to better document and collaborate on your real estate deal pipeline as you strive to gain a competitive edge in the industry.

The post How to Use Technology to Manage Your Real Estate Deal Pipeline appeared first on Dealpath.

While the benefits of increased collaboration seem logical and obvious, many firms are slow to adapt due to organizational inertia. In order to overcome this, it is important to think of the shift to more collaborative platforms not as wholesale replacements, but rather as supplemental tools. From McKinsey: “When asked about their own use of communication tools in their day-to-day work, most executives report that social technologies overall are largely supplemental. Nearly three-quarters of respondents say they rely primarily on older technologies, such as email, phone calls, and texting, to communicate with others at work.”

This process of adoption takes time, often times years but the commitment is necessary to receive the payoff. “In the latest survey, 45 percent say social technologies are very or extremely integrated into day-to-day work at their companies, up from one-third who said so one year before.”

The benefits of starting on this path to increased collaboration using technology is that through adoption, the reliance on traditional methods (email and phone) reduces. By using these collaborative platforms, organizations are able to greater leverage the workforce and data to maximize returns. “On average, respondents at organizations with message-based platforms report spending 62 percent of their time using traditional communication tools and 38 percent of their time using social tools, compared with a 71-29 split for all other respondents.”

One thing the McKinsey report doesn’t dive into are the massive benefits of leveraging the collaboration platform. By empowering CRE teams through a single platform, leadership can boost output by injecting data (ie. ESRI, Google Maps, Google Photos) and can harvest efficiencies in transactional execution with dynamic checklists, reminders, and alerts.

Challenges for Adoption in CRE

Organizations have multiple ways to avoid the shift to increasing collaboration and simple inertia can be a challenge to adopting new software and processes. It is important to get buy-in from the entire team. Even the best software, poorly deployed, will fail to make a meaningful impact on a company’s performance and in many cases will negatively affect performance, results, and even morale throughout your team.

Furthermore, while teams can look at current day performance as acceptable, forward looking organizations should consider that by 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. In order for firms to continue to not only produce and be effective, they must also attract top talent with the best tools available.

For the full McKinsey survey and results, click here.

If you’re interested in learning how Dealpath can work for you, click here.

The post McKinsey Survey Results on Collaboration and Implications for CRE Deal Teams appeared first on Dealpath.

Investment teams still sort through stacks of paper, use manual checklists, compile and re-compile reports, and status updates are never-ending. With upgrades in software and business processes, these practices should be history.

Deal management itself isn’t complicated but there are some factors to take into consideration when evaluating what is best for you and your investment team. We’ve compiled eight things that you should think about when trying to improve your process. By doing so, you’ll:

• streamline your deal execution time
• reduce errors and risks
• increase deal productivity
• improve actionable data analysis
• build a valuable internal data asset

Ultimately, for any results-driven organization, it is essential to maximize resources (either time or capital) and with the software technology at our disposal, teams should be taking full advantage. If you are interested in learning more about what to look for in deal management software, check out our handy (unlocked) guide here.

The post 8 Features for Deal Management Software appeared first on Dealpath.