What software/apps do you use?

The CRM thread is what inspired this question along with my personal interest in finding a central system that has the ability to integrate all facets of an investment/development shop from various systems. So what apps or software do you guys in the industry use? Most real estate firms are pretty archaic and the systems are segmented from my experience. Curious what systems people are using for each facet of their business and if they integrate with each other. Feel free to add additional categories and apps.

Probably helps to state what your firm does and size, ie national investment sales brokerage, local/regional developer focusing on high-rise apartment developments, 3-man value-add shop, commercial or residential focused, etc. Interested to hear from perspective of large corporations down to people managing their own small portfolio.

Property Management - Yardi, MRI, Appfolio, Buildium
Asset Management - VTS, MRI, Yardi
Contact Management/CRM - Cloze, Podio, ZoHo Salesforce
Accounting - MRI, Yardi, Quickbooks, Freshbooks
Project Management - Microsoft Project, Smartsheets, Podio, ZoHo, Wrike
Financial Analysis - Argus, Excel
Property/Market Data - CoStar
Storage/Cloud/Filesharing - Dropbox, Box, Google Drive
Integration - Zapier, IFTTT

 
Best Response

I'll add what our firm uses.

Family office investor/developer with about $1B AUM across the nation, 100 employees.

Property Management - MRI Asset Management - none really besides MRI, looking into other more robust reporting systems Contact Management/CRM - None currently, Cloze from the other thread looks interesting Accounting - MRI Project Management - none really, everyone manually tracks their own projects Financial Analysis - Excel and Argus Property/Market Data - CoStar Storage/Cloud/Filesharing - Dropbox for most things, our department also uses Google Docs for shared reports we manually update Integration - no apps specifically as we don't have multiple systems to integrate. May become an issue as we explore additional apps (Asset Management, for example)

 

Debt/Equity Brokerage with regional focus, 4 employees

Contact Management/CRM - HubSpot, interested in Cloze, passed on Clientlook Accounting - Quickbooks Project Management - G-Suite, OneNote, Slack, have considered Dealpath Financial Analysis - G-sheets, Excel, have considered Argus developer on-demand, Lucro, Fuel, Assess+RE Property/Market Data - Reonomy, Credifi, Crittenden, Buildcentral, have considered Preqin, Recity, SNL, Trepp Storage/Cloud/Filesharing - Google Drive Integration - Integromat (G-sheet + HubSpot), passed on zapier

 

Development Manager here.

I use MS Office, Bluebeam, and our office's cloud server. I also use FileBrowser for accessing that server on iPhone/iPad. I use Dropbox to send drawings to people. I use my iPhone's camera and Mail apps a lot too...

Some of y'all's lists are pretty wild.

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 

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In the war against you and the other qualified candidates out there, the best arsenal is to prove that you have outdone yourself.

In the war against you and the other qualified candidates out there, the best arsenal is to prove that you have outdone yourself.
 

You need to put the new cover page on those TPS reports.

Seriously, have never heard of any of those programs - the main programs you will use in IBD are Excel, PowerPoint, FactSet and/or CapitalIQ, a little bit of Bloomberg and whatever custom macros/toolkits your bank has (if any). There are some websites as well, but that's easily picked up.

 

When we get the data in real time from several sources off the Internet from News Government and financial web sites, RSS feeds especially Twitter in real time we bring that data to our real time analytical engine which aggregate and categorize every important messages then we apply National Language Processing technology to find the real time sentiment. This process is done in less than a second every important event can be seen in our front end dashboard.

 
View from the top:
I'd rather have hardware that let's me get my work done at a pace competitive with a broken macbook.

We're also running XP

Two big heavy models open and my computer starts to have trouble, it's not cool and honestly does hinder your work.

To the hardware or comp argument: as a % of comp. kit is small.

"After you work on Wall Street it’s a choice, would you rather work at McDonalds or on the sell-side? I would choose McDonalds over the sell-side.” - David Tepper
 

At my SA bank, we had shiny new HP laptops with great spec's... but they downgraded them by installing so much company-specific crap and forcing us to use specific programs that it didn't even matter. Ran slow as balls.

 

DEAR SIR,

I am Prince Kufour Otumfuo the elder son of the late King Otumfuo Opoku ware II whose demise occur following a brief illness. Before the death of my father, King Otumfuo Opoku ware II, I was authorised and officially known as the next successor and beneficiary of my father’s algorithmic trading software according to African Traditional rite. Unfortunately his untimely death led to an uprising and the seizure of the code. Although it is invaluable, I need about three fiddy to post as bond for the software. If you can send this cash to my PO box in Abuja, Nigeria I will share the code only with you. Please send the money to the care of: LOCH NESS MONSTER.

MANY THANKS IN ADVANCE

Jack: They’re all former investment bankers who were laid off from that economic crisis that Nancy Pelosi caused. They have zero real world skills, but God they work hard. -30 Rock
 
Revsly:

DEAR SIR,

I am Prince Kufour Otumfuo the elder son of the late King Otumfuo Opoku ware II whose demise occur following a brief illness. Before the death of my father, King Otumfuo Opoku ware II, I was authorised and officially known as the next successor and beneficiary of my father’s algorithmic trading software according to African Traditional rite. Unfortunately his untimely death led to an uprising and the seizure of the code. Although it is invaluable, I need about three fiddy to post as bond for the software. If you can send this cash to my PO box in Abuja, Nigeria I will share the code only with you. Please send the money to the care of: LOCH NESS MONSTER.

MANY THANKS IN ADVANCE

ahahahaha "Unfortunately his untimely death led to an uprising and the seizure of the code." AHAHAHAHA "LOCH NESS MONSTER"

This is fucking hillarious

 

I switched to automated trading since manual trading became to time consuming for me to be compatible with university. (You can find some information about what I did at www.smartstone-capital .com )

Most of the software for trading automation should come with some kind of strategy wizard that lets you implement ideas without programming. However, this will put some limits on the complexity and sophistication of your strategy. Also as a novice in automated trading it is easy to make mistakes (such as strategy overfitting and/or misinterpretation of backtest results) which only become apparent in hindsight after something bad has happened.

For deposit and transfer of money, it really depends on what kind of software to use. A few firms like Tradestation are also a brokerage, while others such as NinjaTrader only provide the platform for your strategies and you need an API connection to your broker, data provider, etc.

Expect to invest quite some time before you get something useful out of it. Bottom line: No easy $$$ ;)

 

morningstar is eh, but much cheaper than the other things you mentioned. Thompson One is another option (though probably more than you'd like to shell out by yourself)

“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be”
 

Try these following tools:

Sage Timeslips CosmoLex MyCase AbacusLaw Clio Amicus Attorney Premium Billing FreshBooks Bill4Time BillingTracker Pro AdvantageLaw

I used Bill4Time. At the end of the day, you want to present an invoice to your client. You want all your hard work organized, itemized and professional. Everything tracked in Bill4Time is organized along the way in detail, down to the billable minute. Producing an invoice in Bill4Time only takes a matter of minutes and comes in many forms, including email, PDF, and LEDES.

 

Hi flyngmonkey. Thanks for your reply. I can't save it in another file format and export it back again, I've already tried. I need recover the data as soon as possible and the only way is recovery the same corrupted file. I saw many recovery tools, but I need an advice because these tools are not free and I do not want to be wrong in buying this tool.

 

Hi again, I'm happy because i could repair my spreadsheet with ExcelFIX. So if anyone has a similar problem, I recommend it.

Thanks anyway for your advice. Regards!

 

Thanks for replying! I've heard of Bloomberg, but am not familiar with it since I don't work in the industry. I'll go do some homework on it and come back with questions.

In the meantime, would you mind giving me your opinion on the Bloomberg terminal as a solution?

-How long did it take you to learn? -How intuitive and user-friendly is it? -Which of its features do you use most often? -What job or jobs did you "hire" it to do, and how well is it doing? Put another way, if it were an employee, would you need to reprimand it for anything?

 

For Asset Management software we use Freshservice. Tried Lansweeper but it fails at maintaining items not on the network (disconnected computers, projectors, loaner laptops)

 

Aladdin by BlackRock is a good standard for institutions. Assuming you're a sole operator, I would look into Interactive Brokers, I believe that have some PM capability that allows you to manage multiple portfolios. I've heard of FinFolio as well, but never seen/used.

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=accountConfiguration&…

 

Hi IOnlyBuy4Caps, just trying to help:

Or maybe the following pros can chime in... SilverBullet17 Josemherrera David-Jung1

Hope that helps.

I'm an AI bot trained on the most helpful WSO content across 17+ years.
 

That software program will your own financial institution make use of to handle offers as well as dealflow? I have observed a few banking institutions make use of Offer Impair. I have observed a few banking institutions that lots of Funds Marketplaces which make use of Offer Reasoning. A few make use of Sales force. Exactly what will your own financial institution make use of?

 

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