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Selecting the right deal management software is vital for institutional real estate investors facing complex workflows, large volumes of deals, and diverse reporting requirements. Before you schedule demos or discuss pricing, it’s important to confirm the platform can handle your day-to-day bottlenecks, while aligning with your broader strategic objectives. Use these 10 questions to quickly zero in on solutions best suited to your organization.
1. How much time does your team spend extracting key information from Offering Memorandums and deal documents?
Building a high-quality deal pipeline often requires screening hundreds, if not thousands, of deals annually. For every successful investment opportunity, many others are reviewed and passed on due to factors such as portfolio fit or economic considerations. While screening is a crucial part of the process, it can drain resources without proper automation. A strong platform should utilize your specific screening criteria, automate data extraction from Offering Memorandums and other vendor documents, and efficiently identify the most promising deals to pursue.
2. Do you require consolidated reporting across multiple regions, asset classes, or teams?
Large portfolios often span various asset classes, geographies, and even different teams managing separate pipelines. Consolidating reports from these disparate sources can be a significant undertaking. A platform that automates and standardizes reporting across these diverse areas can save you time and ensure accurate, comprehensive, and accessible information on each deal.
3. Do you need to restrict access to certain data based on user roles or deal types?
Large-scale operations demand robust permissions to protect sensitive information and maintain compliance. A platform that allows you to easily configure user roles and permissions ensures data security and compliance with internal and external policies.
4. Do you need to evaluate deals in different currencies or units of measure?
When deal teams operate globally, they often collaborate on evaluating deals in various regions in local currencies and/or units of measures. Your platform should be able to handle conversions without manual workarounds, ensuring accurate analysis and comparisons regardless of location.
5. Which workflows—like underwriting, approvals, or diligence—do you want to automate?
Manually tracking each step in complex deal workflows using isolated Excel spreadsheets can lead to bottlenecks, errors, and a lack of transparency. A platform that automates these workflows streamlines your process, provides a centralized view, and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
6. Beyond sales comps, do you need to reference leases, units, or historical underwriting to assess deals?
Commercial real estate investing relies on a broad set of data points—including current lease terms, historical occupancy, and past underwriting assumptions—to fine-tune future decisions. Your platform should centralize this information for quick and comprehensive deal analysis.
7. Do you target capital partners to raise equity and debt for each deal?
A robust platform should help you manage and access capital partners efficiently, ensuring you approach the right partners with the right opportunities given their specific investment criteria.
8. How important is seamless collaboration between deal teams and portfolio managers when allocating capital?
A strong platform should enable deal teams to quickly share deal information with portfolio managers, notify them when funding is required, and allow for efficient allocation requests—all in one place. This ensures that promising opportunities aren’t held up by disconnected workflows or manual processes.
9. How important is it to track stakeholder interactions—calls, meetings, and notes—in one place?
It is important to have a centralized log of all documents and interactions with stakeholders (lenders, JV partners, equity sponsors, etc.) to ensure transparency, accountability, alignment, and that deals forward effortlessly.
10. Do your deals include joint ventures, refinancings, or other non-standard structures?
Your platform should be flexible enough to handle the complexity any of your deal specific structures, without requiring workarounds or manual adjustments; ensuring that you can track and report accurately both internally and with any JV partners.
Final Thoughts
Answering these questions will help you cut through the noise and focus on solutions that align with your institutional real estate processes and strategic goals. At Origin, we’ve built our platform around these exact needs—because we’ve experienced them firsthand.
