Just joined the community and would like to contribute as a way of offsetting my request for some feedback. Quick background: - "Little Three" undergrad - Career started in CRE leasing; 2yrs at a small regional firm followed by 2yrs in the NYC HQ of one of the majors - Most recently, ~7 years at a commercial real estate investment bank (joined as an analyst, left as a VP) - Worked on $12B+ of closed deals, built some custom models (heavy automation around tenancy and Argus data), and maintained pipeline and comp databases for our office - Lots of reps with multi-tenant office (CBD and suburban), equity sales, some debt placement; deal sizes ranged from ~$20-50M (CBD/suburban) when I started to $1B+ CBD tower portfolios toward the end; mostly right place at the right time - 2 years delivering a 2-day orientation to all summer interns joining the firm - Taught myself to code on the side, partly because I love computers and partly so that I could program beyond Excel macros in VBA (and specifically get into web development) - Now building a database for CRE investments with a strong technical co-founder; investment teams use it to track their deal flow and underwriting on a map Fire away and I'll do my best to be helpful.
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All of the above. The desire was always there. I tried to channel it in that job in various ways but, to your point, found the culture not particularly receptive. To be fair, I worked at an accomplished firm that was fully in "execute now" mode (in the middle of a market surge from 2011-17), so they were likely right to focus the way they did.
From a learning standpoint, I benefited from seeing a massive amount of deal volume and data in a short time-frame. Definitely a little bit of being in the right place at the right time, and I remain grateful for that. In the process of drinking out of the fire hose, I noticed a number of inefficiencies in the industry that seemed addressable. Notably, I was also able to gain some exposure to software development through projects the firm had underway internally. These things combined to grow my confidence that I could actually execute on an idea if I had the right co-founder.
I met my co-founder through my old job. The firm hired a design/development consultancy to build out a prototype of some software for internal use. I got assigned to the project and part of my role was to embed with the dev team at their office for ~10 weeks. I made a number of friends while I was there and stayed in touch after the project ended. I ended up banding together with a few of these folks so that I could learn to code and we could hack on ideas.After I left the firm, I approached one of my friends from that group to pursue a narrower set of ideas; he is my co-founder.
We're bootstrapped. There are a number of reasons for this, the largest of which is our wanting to first have real traction. I'm deeply grateful to my wife, who went back to work to give our family (we have two boys under the age of three) the runway to chase this.
We haven't proven anything yet. We've been constantly talking to users and iterating on the product, which has brought us closer to something that feels viable. But we're not seeing the type of adoption and user retention that indicates we've struck a nerve yet. One of the biggest lessons so far is that most CRE investors aren't good at maintaining databases (Excel or otherwise). So we're focusing most of our effort now on trying to build out infrastructure that makes it possible to passively translate certain raw data from teasers, OMs, and diligence documents into actionable, structured data in our system -- and to do this 10x cheaper than the cost of having an entry-level analyst allocate time to it.
So you’re trying to cut out 80%+ of the users on this website.
In all seriousness- that’s amazing. Great to hear your willingness to take a huge risk and go for something that would benefit the industry as a whole.
Where do you see yourself going with this? It sounds like you’re trying to avoid outside capital until you start seeing some tangible returns? Do you plan on scaling this into something or selling it off to a data aggregator (like CoStar or similar)?
Having spent four years combined as an analyst or associate at my previous job, my view is that analysts (broker- or principal-side) will always have a role in the underwriting process (which itself is a small part of the deal life-cycle ... source, underwrite, bid/close, asset manage, recap/dispo). Today's "underwrite" phase is something along the lines of:
Step 1 is a major pain point that we think is addressable. In fact, firms openly admit that they're unable to consistently even do Step 1 -- they may sign a lot of CAs to gather info, but they only underwrite a fraction of those opportunities. The rest of that deal data is in a hard drive folder basically unusable.
Our big-picture goal is to make the market more open and accessible. If structured deal data is affordable (potentially even free if an open standard can be established), then deal distribution becomes more efficient in terms of targeting accuracy and transaction costs. We're committed to first building consensus around a standard data format and then building a marketplace on top of that.
We'll need outside capital to accomplish the goal, but we won't seek it until we can prove that we've addressed step 1 from above. Proving is really about working closely with early adopters and measuring product usage to validate that we've made their lives easier.
If anyone here fits that early adopter profile (and can get buy-in to pilot something new) and wants to help shape the product, please DM me. We're making the product free for the first firm in a given geographic market.
Thanks for the encouragement, @Malta Monkey"! I love the industry and hope we can make a meaningful contribution.