Enhance Your Operations with Dealpath Software for Operations

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[Music] thank you [Music] all right hello and welcome everyone I'm Chuck nicewonger with realcom I'm here with Mike's Roca CEO and co-founder of dealpath welcome Mike Chuck thank you very much for having me wonderful to be here at realcom tell me what you think so far I think it has been a fantastic event and really fun getting to celebrate the 25 years of realcom we've been thrilled to be participating for nine years now and have watched the conference continue to grow this was really fantastic you took away a Digi award yes we are really honored to be recognized with the digi award very exciting for the deal path team and again really I want to thank realcom for the recognition and our clients and partners for all of our work together well I'm going to come back on that subject of the deal path data ingestion and the reason for that award we're going to cover that before we finish today but first tell me a little about a bit about your journey because I think some of our live audience and our viewing audience might not know that you were so involved in Zynga social gaming so how did we go from Zynga to co-founder of dealpath you know deal path is really my career is coming together when I started my career out of undergrad I went to work for a very large real estate private Equity Firm and that's where I was first exposed to real estate transactions and how large-scale private Equity groups are managing data I very unexpectedly kind of got pulled into software development which led me out to the Bay Area and have been built in venture-backed software companies for the past 15 years or so some of those Adventures included social gaming and Zynga which I actually saw at Farmville machine out on the floor earlier but I think bringing that back four more colleagues and friends in real estate continue to ask for Solutions and tools and really got to use some of those learnings from building consumer applications to partner with them and build out solutions for Real Estate we co-founded deal path nine years ago now and has been methodically building it out since with so much work ahead which we're really excited for I think that uh yeah I I thought when I first heard the social gaming part I thought maybe it was because that was what you were doing in college so much that you just got into it so so well uh you mentioned co-founding deal path nine years ago that's right software development was not necessarily that easy especially for the fintech background you must have realized there were some gaps in the industry that is what we were really observing and we did so much client and market research to kind of understand the landscape that I'd been a part of previously but you know really getting to see a broader view of that in 2014 proptech wasn't a term yet I think we still called it real estate software services and there was some you know incumbent players that have played a key role for a long time but there wasn't a lot of development happening since then we've seen an explosion of Investments and development and what we now call proptech we've gone through this adoption wave now starting to see consolidation and it's just been a really exciting time as proptech has really emerged it's a kind of period of time as real estate goes through this belated and very accelerated digital transformation now I know with uh you mentioned 10 trillion dollars in transactions not only that but you're you're now answerable to venture capitalists I think right how does that how does that feel I mean for me if I were to take that kind of an investment I'd be a little nervous about how we're how we're doing it and and the responsibility associated with that that partnership we're excited about we take it very seriously um we were thrilled last year after realcom to close our serious C fundraising which is led by Morgan Stanley a 43 million dollar investment and the numbers are getting big and real um and we just want to stay really focused on the solutions to our clients and build a healthy business that continues to compound value so does it put a lot more pressure on you as the CEO answerable to that you know I don't think about it that way but I think our team is competitive and wants to build great Solutions and we now have more and more resources to do that we have more responsibilities to our clients and our other partners um and want to continue to grow together as it's incredible I think some of the pieces that come to my mind I remember being in commercial real estate sitting in the Acquisitions meetings with spreadsheets handed out to everyone and that's how they went through their deals and it was a meeting every week it usually lasted three hours 25 people crammed into a room going deal by deal by deal on a spreadsheet it's come a long way it has and that's really the Gap that we saw was this that there weren't really a lot of tools designed for the front office of the buy side and whether it's teams that are working on Acquisitions and dispositions development projects debt financing to date they they had really cobbled together things that weren't designed for that important work teams were managing their pipelines and Excel they had Word document checklists for diligence and closing and as the industry has continued to grow up and scale in order to operate at larger scale with speeding Precision you really need purpose-built tools and solutions and that's what we've been building out now how about integration Partners you can't do this by yourself absolutely and we see that as a core part of our strategy is that we've really been built from the ground up as an open platform designed for interoperability dealpath provides a third-party API and developer portal we support ETL bulk uploads exports we have native Integrations too so we really view our role as being the center of a modern real estate Tech stack and want to make sure that firms are able to leverage the other point Solutions and tools that they need both upstream and downstream from us and I think that kind of allows us to Circle back a little bit on this idea of data ingestion and one of the things that I mentioned before when we had our our call preparing for this was I do recall that it seemed like deals had some kind of a recognizable pattern where some of them would be eliminated right away and others would begin to go through the acquisition maturation process term sheet sign letter of intent moving towards closing sometimes they would fall off for a variety of reasons but it would seem to me and I think it would seem logical that a deal either fits well into a portfolio or a particular fund of assets or it doesn't and artificial intelligence and machine learning could probably predict some of that so how are you integrating some of that or how does it look like for the future of a machine learning and artificial intelligence in this level of analytics it's been a big part of our business for years now and increasingly the amount of innovation is incredible you know a few things that we have observed Is that real estate of course is well known as a document heavy business and there's so much information that gets trapped in documents and a lot of time money and energy spent trying to get important information out of documents and sometimes also back into them that is a problem space that we think that machine learning and artificial intelligence is very well designed to help solve so reducing the friction of getting that data in and out of documents from there I think is some of the Predictive Analytics that you're talking about and another really big opportunity for the industry we believe that the future of real estate investment management will certainly be more programmatic polio management and transaction execution but it's going to take a lot of work to get there and the first steps are you know how do we help organize and structure all of the data that these firms have and have access to and start visualizing it so they can be more data driven in their decision making and start automating the steps along the way that is what we're working on okay now I would say too and there's been some conversations here in some of the sessions proptech has a lot of competitors in this space so you're you you pers the deal path itself has competitors and and then there's pros and cons how do you differentiate or how would you tell a client that deal path is differentiated from some of your competitors something that's important for us is focus um and so we are purpose built for real estate investment management and we support institutional investors on this part of their business so we do not do everything for everyone but we are really focused on the right solutions for those use cases I think that that is our kind of greatest superpower is that focus and other businesses might have started in other areas or you know have a different strategy and approach but I think that being purpose-built for real estate investment management really focus on the front office and these specific needs is where we can provide value and provide value to our clients does that indicate then that there's room for everyone to do well in this industry or is it more moving towards potential mergers and Acquisitions and um I do think that we're entering into a really healthy consolidation phase that there's been this you know explosion of investment in development there's now thousands of different points Solutions clients can't manage that many different tools and that many different vendors and so there's going to be things that are getting more traction that I think that resources will end up kind of congregating around and at the end of the day there will be more solutions but maybe a group of platforms that are more dominant maybe in our last 30 seconds here how about your ideal client um you know so for us right now we're big fans of minimizing variables and we do focus on firms that are headquartered in North America we typically look at firms that have assets under management of greater than a billion dollars um and those use cases of Acquisitions dispositions development and debt financing are the parts of their business that we can really support um now I think that we're respectful and excited about lots of other things but that's our wheelhouse where we're focused today okay well you heard it from Mike's Roca CEO and co-founder of dealpath uh I'd say people be sure and check you out check out your what you have to offer and make them part of your vendor selection process thank you very much chuck thank you enjoy appreciate it thank you [Music]