Perfecting your Pipeline Management Process

The institutionally managed commercial real estate market is valued at $11 trillion and is expected to grow to $40 trillion by the year 2040¹. 

This means that investors like you, are working to optimize their investment process, by adding only the highest quality deals to their pipelines. But as it stands, your team may be facing issues with volume, speed, accuracy, and clarity when going about each stage of an acquisition. 

Wasting valuable time and resources is a misuse of expensive human capital and is simply frustrating. As a member of an acquisitions team, it’s vital to be able to maintain an organized database of new deals being considered for investment, in order to quickly sift through and provide updates on them in a minute's notice. Information constantly changes with nuances and industry context, which must be reported on accordingly. Team members need access to this information in real time so they are not bogged down by the back and forth of updates through email. Once polished, these pipelines are often shared with investors during fundraising periods and other initiatives, proving to be a key source of a firm’s potential volume. 

The challenge arises when acquisitions teams lose sight of how to manage or update their pipelines with new information, or when to add context at the right time. Maintaining version control is difficult, and gathering information from broker blasts or offering memorandums that arrive in your inbox is time-consuming.

A lot of firms today still bring print-outs of the OM to Investment Committee and pipeline meetings, because not enough vital information is being captured or displayed to the fullest extent and in an easy manner to digest.

For Acquisitions Managers and Executives, the main tasks at hand are to identify priority deals and allocate resources in order to move the right deals closer to the finish line.  However, it may be challenging to keep track of all new or existing opportunities which leads to a misallocation of load across their team. 

Crucial time is typically lost trying to access or reformat data, when they could instead reallocate time to more important responsibilities such as underwriting and due diligence. Missing information and files may also lead to a negative impact on decision-making without having the full context or potentially being in breach of contract. 

In considering these complications, the world’s top investment firms turn to Altrio’s deal management solution, Origin, to help.

With Origin: 

• Acquisitions team members are able to stay on top of deals as they move through the various stages, because Origin seamlessly adds deals to the pipeline with zero manual entry required.
• The pipeline is cloud-based and remains as a single source of truth, with a trove of sale, lease and expense comps supporting it. 
• Database information is aggregated and comprehensible. This makes it even more motivating to keep it maintained, to enhance institutional knowledge and processes across the firm.
• Missing or limited information is a problem of the past, because Origin allows users to configure the level of detail within each pipeline, ensuring that crucial data is readily available to inform key business outcomes.
• Investors are able to transform their current pipeline process with specific software customization and configurations to make Origin bespoke to their workflow.

Say No to Silos

Optimizing the investment process begins with managing all deals from a centralized platform as the single source of truth. Replacing silos that may exist, fragmented or incomplete spreadsheets, or context that may have never made it out of the deal teams’ individual email inboxes, is critical to ensuring all information is accessible. After all, data unseen is data unused. 

Collaboration is Key

In the same vein of deconstructing silos, teams that use Origin are also enabled with the collaboration tooling needed to communicate clearly across teams and departments. Deal information is live and updated in real-time, and each task or checklist has set owners to ensure no detail slips between the cracks. 

Running More Effective Pipeline Meetings

In keeping up with brimming schedules filled with meetings and check-in’s, it’s important to center the purpose of a pipeline meeting around the health of your investment process. Are deals moving forward as they should? What areas of improvement may exist that are being overlooked?

Beyond the typical set agenda, answer the more introspective questions surrounding why deals are being passed on, and at what points in the investment process there are gaps or drop-offs. Have a better understanding of patterns across partners, regions, sectors or asset classes, as well as ways the investment process could be enhanced or refined for better results. 

Building out an Optimized  Process

All in all, to optimize your investment performance, you must identify the obstructions in your path. In your funnel, it’s important to understand gaps and analyze how to fix upon the issues that may occur. Whether there’s a lack of deal volume or a function of your process slowing things down, using Origin helps gain information about each step, who’s involved, how long it takes, and what happens at each stage of the process.

Utilizing deal management software allows commercial real estate investors to streamline their investment process. Investors can also save time and grow context which provides a better competitive advantage in creating a more robust, repeatable process, negotiating more effectively and closing higher quality deals.

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Ready to learn more? Contact us for a demo of Origin today.

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¹  _{https://www.pgim.com/real-estate/research/birds-eye-view-real-estate-markets-2021}