Six Ridge Partners develops and invests in multifamily, industrial, and mixed-use real estate across the Mountain West. Founded in 2010 and headquartered outside Salt Lake City, the firm has owned or developed $1.44 billion across 66 ventures and manages $630 million in assets today. Its strategy is deliberately regional — the Mountain West is, as the firm puts it, "our home, not a target market" — and it is executed by a team small enough that the people captaining deals also carry several other hats.
That combination is what brought Six Ridge to Altrio. The firm was sourcing and evaluating at a pace that outstripped the systems holding the work, and it had no dedicated operations layer to absorb the difference.
Jason Head (Senior Director of Development), Dominique Wirth (VP of Operations) and Matthew Roderick (Senior Associate) spoke to us about the firm's search for a platform, its implementation, and what has changed in the work since.
Challenge
Six Ridge had no single system for its investment process. Underwriting, pipeline tracking, and broker, lender, and investor communication each lived somewhere different.
We had a solution that was jury-rigged for each of those, but nothing that brought it all together. Everything was very disorganized. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
The pipeline itself was an Excel sheet, maintained via manual updates. Each time an underwriting model turned, its assumptions were rekeyed into that sheet so the pipeline would reflect the current view of the deal.
Market data was even more time consuming. Comparables accumulated as a folder of spreadsheets and PDFs with no structure across them, which made every use of a comp an act of recall and retrieval.
We had a folder that just had a bunch of Excel sheets and PDFs full of comps. It took a lot of time to comb through each one — I know there's one in here somewhere that I remember, I need to go find it — and piece them together for each deal. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
The cost was time, and it landed on the people least able to spare it. Assembling an investor pitch deck meant pulling from several sources at once. Answering a question about a deal's economics meant locating the model that was current when the question was asked.
What Six Ridge Learned to Look For
Six Ridge evaluated numerous platforms. What the firm wanted was clear enough to state: a system that tracked the pipeline, held underwriting, and organized market data, with contact and communication management that met the standard any modern CRM should meet, all of it connected to the properties underneath.
What was harder to evaluate was the team on the other side of the table.
Some of the groups we spoke with knew the vocabulary without really knowing the business. They sound credible in a demo, but the objective is getting you to sign. — Jason Head, Senior Director of Development, Six Ridge Partners
Six Ridge came out of its search with a sharper requirement than it went in with: the people implementing the platform had to understand how a real estate business actually runs.
The Altrio Difference
Implementation Led by People Who Know the Business
Six Ridge was implementing its first real deal management platform. The firm could describe its problems precisely and still had no basis for specifying the system that would solve them.
We were coming from nothing, and we didn't know what we didn't know. Rather than asking us what we wanted, the Altrio team guided us to where we should be. We could tell them what we liked and didn't like when they presented it to us, but we couldn't tell them what best practices were. They worked with us to figure out what success looked like. — Dominique Wirth, VP of Operations, Six Ridge Partners
Altrio's professional services team configures the platform against how a firm invests, not against a list of requests. That is possible because the people doing it have worked in the industry, and it is the difference between a system that reproduces a team's existing habits and one that improves on them.
It felt consultative, and sophisticated in knowing our business. The Altrio team comes from our side of the business, so they understood us when we talked about our pain points. — Jason Head, Senior Director of Development, Six Ridge PartnersTheir professional services team is quick to respond and flexible with our schedule. I flood them with questions. They come to every call with an agenda and they really know this business. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
A Pipeline the Whole Team Works From
The pipeline is the most-used part of the platform at Six Ridge. Every opportunity the firm is evaluating is tracked in one place, configured to how the team wants to see it, and the Monday deal team meeting runs directly from it.
Having everything in one place, and being able to edit it on the fly as we're discussing deals in that meeting, is really helpful. Anyone who's logged in can do it during the meeting. — Dominique Wirth, VP of Operations, Six Ridge Partners
The Excel pipeline and the version-control problems that came with it are gone.
Underwriting Models as the Source of Deal Metrics
Six Ridge uploads its underwriting models into Altrio, which extracts the firm's key metrics and surfaces them on the deal and pipeline. Assumptions are no longer rekeyed by hand when a model turns, and the numbers on screen are the numbers in the model.
I can be looking at a deal with our executive team, and any question they have for me is all on one page. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
A Market Database the Team Builds by Email
Comparables and offering memorandums are forwarded from Outlook to the firm's shared Altrio inbox, which extracts and organizes the data. Because everyone on the team sends to the same place, the firm's market database compounds with every deal it looks at rather than fragmenting across individual drives.
Now I upload the comp files for extraction, search by city or square footage, and build the filters I need. I save them to a deal, and every time we need comps for that deal — every time an investor asks — I go to the deal and they're there. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
Deal Activity Where the Deal Is
Calls, emails, meetings, and notes are logged against both the deal and the contact they belong to.
Being able to log communications in one place, tied to a deal and a contact, without having to do additional work, is what we were ultimately looking for. — Dominique Wirth, VP of Operations, Six Ridge Partners
Impact, Summarized
Investor materials in minutes, not hours. Preparing a pitch deck for a deal going under contract used to mean assembling economics, deal summary, and comparables from separate places. The comparable set alone was the bottleneck.
Before, it was: comb through all these PDFs, comb through these Excel sheets, and it's going to take me three hours to put a list of 20 comps together. — Matthew Roderick, Senior Associate, Six Ridge Partners
Now the economics and summary come off the deal's overview page and the comparables are already attached to it. The set that took three hours to assemble is exported and narrowed to the twenty the team wants to show investors in a fraction of that time.
Answers available when they're asked. Executive reviews no longer wait on someone locating the current model or the right file. The deal page holds what the question is about.
A market view that compounds. Every offering memorandum and comparable the team receives adds to a searchable database rather than a folder, and the value of that database grows with the firm's deal flow instead of being consumed by it.
Conclusion
Six Ridge is still growing into the platform. What has already changed is where the team's time goes: less of it spent reconstructing what the firm already knew, more of it spent on the deals themselves.
