Outsourcing to India, etc.
Does anyone here outsource some of their work to India? For easy tasks such as rent roll, T12, market data, etc.?
I relied heavily on this at my old firm, which was not in real estate. Huge help to our team.
Edit: if you have used before please mention name of outsource company (if not internal), and type of work performed.
Previous company I worked at did this.
Name of outsourcing company, if it wasn’t internal? What kind of work did they help out with?
Internal division within company. Helped with all aspects of the business. DD, AP, AR, book-keeping, compliance, financial analysis, some of the seniors had personal assistants, maintenance/work order tracking, collections, and more.
I have worked at two national brokerages. Both outsourced heavily to India on internal teams.
Internal team and I am at a bank. Though being at a bank means we actually employ a few thousands in Asia for a lot of non real estate work too so it is easy to get a couple of people to exclusively work with us on the CRE side. I also believe Berkadia has an in house team in India. I think many firms have learnt from the outsourcing horror stories and now actually go the extra mile in setting up an internal team overseas, get boots on the ground and personally train them, etc. It might seem like a lot of work but once you train them, it is like a well oiled machine. I have no complaints. This is by far the single most thing that has significantly helped my quality of life. Nothing else comes even close. The time difference works very well. Before I log off for the day at 5 or 6 PM, I can shoot an email to the team in Asia telling them to spread the rent roll, T-12, budget (and more responsibilities are only being added every year) and the completed work will be in my inbox when I wake up in the morning. So when I was asleep they were working through the night. All I have to do is check their work which is not rocket science, like making sure the number of units, rents and SF in the source doc match with our model for example. This is truly a god send. If you have worked on a portfolio or have to manually enter data from shitty scanned PDFs which able to extract cannot process, you will know how much of a pain in the ass and time suck it can be. This data entry/bitch work being done by people in Asia who get paid pennies means our team in the US can spend their time on more worthwhile stuff like transaction management which is frankly more interesting.
can you elaborate on the outsourcing horror stories you referenced?
Completely agree. If you use them right, train them, hop on the phone, etc. they are a massive help.
Used them all the time at my old company (Big 4) and surprised more real estate folks aren’t taking advantage given some of the mundane work we have in our plates.
Are there any particular companies who do these stuff in India/ How do you guys find these people?
One firm I will suggest is MCUBE Financial
Have you used them personally? If so, what did they help with?
They did initial spread of financials, rent rolls, etc. into a pre-built model. They would also do a reconciliation between sources if you had 2 sources of info for the same item, i.e. a cash flow from Argus and OM. The way we used them, they had a pre built procedure which could be over ridden with specific instructions.
Armada Analytics
Have you used them personally? If so, what did they help with?
Yes. For underwriting debt and equity. They price per deal and it is dependent on scope. Their focus is on the debt side and specifically multifamily. They underwrite over 1000 transactions a year. The equity side is newer and focuses on all property types.
If you are looking for simple spreading of numbers they may not be your best option. They tend to focus on the entire transaction but it never hurts to ask.
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