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my uh welcome to this uh latest power briefing with commercial observer my name is tom akitelli i'm a co-deputy editor here at commercial observer in new york and the title of this particular briefing is breaking down the modern deal data and tech become key market participants so i'm going to introduce the topic a little bit and introduce our panelists we have a q a open you can submit questions for later on in the hour so just to start the globalization of the real estate market has fueled the digitizing of deal management a trend that has only gained greater momentum in the wake of unprecedented business challenges this past year and a half a truly global market requires real time remote collaboration and real estate experts are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and data to deliver on large-scale deals so we're going to hear how new cutting-edge solutions and robust data sources are driving deal activity and what this could mean for the future of the commun commercial real estate industry so our guests today are panelists colin apple co-chief investment officer managing director of acquisitions at bridge investment group a real estate private equity firm holden latimer director and vice president of acquisitions asset management and dispositions of at bridge at bridge investment okay multi-family yes actually i think i messed up colin's title as co-chief investment officer managing director of multi-family value ad funds and managing director of multi-family acquisitions of bridge and then mike shkroka co-founder and co-founded deal path a real estate technology company in 2014 and is now the chief executive officer so for colin and holden to start us off okay well first of all can you guys tell us a little bit about what bridge does just introduce our viewers to your company a little bit sure yeah bridge investment group is a is a real estate focused private equity uh company we've got several verticals um you know holden and i work on the multi-family investment verticals we have a a multi-family strategy that has a value-add um and a and a workforce affordable housing strategy so we have two multi-family strategies and then we have a an office commercial office vertical we have a senior housing vertical and we have a debt vertical we are a large investor in the opportunity zone space and um i'm trying to think of what i forgot we have a senior housing vertical as well and um and we recently launched a triple net industrial vertical so we are um you know heavy focus on on real estate assets we we have a large focus in in secondary markets um and we've at this point we've got uh over 25 billion assets under management i might ask about some of those at the end the workforce housing and oz in particular but to start us off um can you guys talk about you know what were some of the challenges to efficiency that led bridge to adopt deal past technology and to seek him out in the first place well we had in in i want to hold it to jump in on this too but we had we had several things going on within our group um you know we you call it pre 2016. um we our asset management and our acquisition um teams were were separated um and and so it was a separate group so we had we did we made a decision internally um that it made a lot more sense for us to combine efforts to so we could keep uh the the team that was responsible for for buying the uh for buying the properties um to also asset manage them through you know through the life of the of the deals so we you know we went from a group of i don't know hold and we were probably seven people and and our group expanded we're we're you know close to 25 people now so we were we were expanding um our team and we were also expanding our responsibility and we wanted the ability to you know to to monitor the work um we wanted the ability to um to to have consistency through you know through all of the people that you know the additional people that we brought onto our group so we needed a system that was you know better than excel something that we could track something that that we could see online we spend we spend a significant amount of time on the road and and we needed some sort of you know central database that we could keep our information and communicate with each other um you know we also had uh you know as i mentioned before so you know holden and i work in the multi-family strategy which has which has two efforts so we expanded our um our responsibilities and you know so we were expanding our our unit count our our property count and we just needed a better way to to keep our data together and then i think probably most important for me is we were um you know we were finding that the third party data providers that we subscribe to and still do we found that there was there seemed to be a delay or a disconnect in in some of the information and we wanted to compile we saw we spend a lot of time and we may talk about it later but we we we try to see as many deals in the market that we can so we try to underwrite um you know our team tries to underwrite every multi-family transaction that we can see um you know nationwide in yeah there are a few markets we don't but for the most part we're underwriting every deal so we're compiling a lot of information and i think historically that information you know we you know we put it in you know our server on box whatever we're using and we have those underwrites and we have that information but it was it was scattered and we we didn't have it in a central spot so we found that you know the and i'm particularly referring to understanding where cap rates are going in the market and being able to understand that and with you know we looked at deal path as a way that we could compile all of that information and we'd be able to filter it and understand it better so we could have more real-time data um in in all of our different markets because we're underwriting so many deals so we could see you know what what we view as a true cap rate where trends are going and on top of that we could see you know because everyone's got a different input for how they are looking at at cap rates and we wanted to look at it from our perspective so we could compare apples to apples to our under rights and what we see as as market cap and you know and and how we could uh project our our exit cap rates so it was a way for us to you know to organize the the data that we had been combined compiling for years um and to be able to track the market a little bit better okay beholden you may have another thought yeah yeah and i think colin hit hit a lot of our pain points um you know going back to team size and structure you know we had a you know exponentially growing team um so you know we when i started i think we had four or five analysts now we've got you know over a dozen um we're also you know tracking more deals in various markets so you know team structure changed number of members on the team had changed we needed something that we could scale better than excel and communicating through outlook for our pipeline and for our task management processes um we also we're just we're managing higher deal flow looking at new types of uh transactions new markets and just to give you kind of an idea i think our team probably looked at over 1500 deals across the country last year which last year was a down down year in terms of number of deals we were evaluating so we just had a massive increase in what we're looking at um you know number of team team members that needed to coordinate across that pipeline and across our various tasks um another one was just a big pain point for us was finding a cloud-based solution something that was real time you know having a dozen analysts trying to update a report in excel and have that up to date for meetings and everything was becoming a real a real issue so we had been looking for a cloud-based solution for quite a while when we when we kind of came across deal path and they seemed to check a lot of the boxes that we were looking to solve within our firm you both talked about bridge growing was this was this during the pandemic or had been going on for a couple years or for for several years well for some people um mike i wanted to ask okay can you explain what deal path does for companies like bridge and you know um pretend someone doesn't entirely understand cloud technology and how it might relate to real estate or real estate investment sure um and tom thank you for for having me on and uh thank you to commercial over for for hosting us here today um deal path is the industry's most trusted purpose-built real estate investment platform empowering hundreds of leading firms uh including blackstone aw oxford properties principal real estate and bridge investment group to invest in the built world and really excited to be here speaking with bridge because we really view them as kind of a case study um of what good looks like um in terms of leveraging a modern real estate tech stack operating at scale with speed and proficiency and really impressively growing their investment program with aum and empowered people deal path really serves as the command center for the front office to focus on value-add work to identify and mitigate risks and to deliver optimal risk adjusted returns i always think of us as kind of like pipeline through portfolio management and excited to to talk more about kind of bridges use of both deal path and more broadly technology i think you know maybe going back to your question our clients need to operate at scale um you know they are raising deploying returning on on billions of dollars and uh need to do so with speed and precision to um deliver optimal risk adjusted returns two of the the key challenges to address are decentralized data and highly complex workflows and we think that investment decision glory is really when you can see the performance of your owned portfolio overlaid with the opportunities that your team is seeing in the market and the comps of every asset and deal that you've ever looked at are worked on and that is really what dealpad provides having that centralized data that is globally accessible configurable workflows that enable your team to work effectively from anywhere and the data security that leading institutions require i know you can't probably can't get into proprietary information but how did deal path develop this over the last several years i mean yeah um you know geopath has really been born out of of years of hearing needs from the market i started my career in real estate finance um a very large-scale real estate private equity group um and former colleagues and friends who are really persistent um in describing the challenges that that they're facing um and their search for better solutions for this very important work we've built out our platform and company quite a bit over the past seven years um and today again are excited to be supporting more than six trillion dollars of transactions um and many of the largest most sophisticated real estate investors in the world including bridge investment group what's the growth been like in during the pandemic i'm just curious um i think the short story is we've had fantastic growth it's been a very big year for us but i don't think that that was obvious um so um like everyone else i think last march when we really began to recognize the pandemic in north america um we weren't sure what to expect our business was able to uh transition to mandatory work from home very seamlessly as a software company but initially you know we were seeing polarization um in our sales and go to market efforts but we're seeing some accounts that we're pushing out uh for reasons that you might expect where management teams were struggling to meet together and make decisions there was anxiety about making budget decisions during this time of uncertainty frankly kind of triage in other parts of their business but on the other side we were really seeing a influx of uh inbounds from from accounts that were transacted very quickly because they felt like they needed to have a collaborative platform in place for the work ahead um and there had really been a spotlight put on um the need for having that centralized data and those configurable workflows um so we've had our highest growth periods ever we've seen our sales cycles um compressing um and you know beyond just deal path i think that the pandemic has very clearly been a um accelerator um in the digital transformation of real estate i think you know look back seven eight years ago um there wasn't a whole lot happening in real estate software services uh there was a few very large incumbents um that that the industry has used for a long time but not a lot happening and there's been a wave of investments and developments measured in the billions and billions of dollars of venture capital and hundreds of thousands of new point solutions that have been coming to market um and before the pandemic in 2019 i think that we were really kind of starting to see real traction in the adoption of some of those new solutions and maybe crossing the first chasm from early adopters to early majority of the real estate industry leveraging some of these new solutions right and with the pandemic maybe crossing the next chasm from early majority to mass market adoption of these new solutions so um again i think that um it's been a incredible year of growth for us um and we're very excited for our business uh more broadly though i think that you know real estate has been underserved by software and technology for a long time um and is going through a belated and very accelerated digital transformation that's really the most important thing for everyone in the market whether you're a traditional real estate owner or operator or a vendor or a new upstart an incredibly exciting time as the industry kind of moves to digital right um that's a very good point uh how did you guys connect how did bridge and deal path connect any of the three want to answer i'm just curious how does how's the discussion like this i mean it's a big move for a company uh it's it's a major move especially given the conditions of the last year and a half and the growth in the company itself so how did you guys connect what were what were some of the catalysts yeah i'm happy to share my perspective but colin and holden um you know want to maybe defer to you first so i'll go and then hold because holden was the uh the big proponent to make this move and so we had a few people you know there are two in particular i'm thinking of holden holden being one of them that they came up to you know to the managing director and said look we need we need a better solution than what we've got right now we if the scale that we're talking about going to we cannot continue to do everything um with excel we just you know there's there's too many errors there's too many you know issues with people changing spreadsheets there's you know we just we need a better sense of consistency so we had a few people and and you know holding on want you to weigh in here but go out and look at some different options and and they eventually came back with with the path though so i was really introduced through through our team um holden how did how did you get introduced to deal path yeah as colin said you know i think we were experiencing a lot of pain points with our growth and just maintaining you know consistency in our process and you know we were really the the key thing we were looking for was a cloud-based system to do our transaction pipeline management um and we had looked at a couple companies um and and we had our process pretty well defined and built out in excel but we were just having issues with having that many users in excel and keeping things consistent um and and the other groups we'd looked at had provided okay solutions but it was essentially just making our current process cloud-based it was just kind of replicating what we were doing in excel in a cloud in a cloud-based platform um i i just stumbled i think i just got an email from you know someone reaching out from deal path um kind of looked into the company looked exactly kind of what we were looking for um and so that's kind of how we got connected i reached out went through a demo and then kind of escalated it up to my you know many managing directors and that's how we got connected i'm curious how big would these excel spreadsheets get that you were dealing with i mean there's only so many tabs yeah they were getting pretty massive as i said earlier we were tracking thousands of transactions um over over you know periods so we ended up you know breaking it up into different periods right we didn't track all our data in one place we'd break it up um annually um just so that you know spreadsheets wouldn't get too enormous and again the big thing we were starting to have you know over you know 10 plus analysts that needed to update these sheets on a weekly basis and it just was a massive pain to try to get that all updated at the same time and have a live sheet that's that's up to date for for our leadership and they were getting pretty complicated they were you know we were trying to program them so they would send out reminders and all the things that would make a lot more sense on a platform like deal path rather than rather than you know coding within excel so they were just getting very complicated and easy to break and so there were there was a lot of fixing going on that we wanted to you know we wanted to focus on our core business of investing in real estate not in fixing you know spreadsheets right i imagine there's a lot more um well mike can probably talk about this but there's a lot greater security right and cloud-based technology than it's than excel or a spreadsheet system like that correct yeah i think that that that is true and i just maybe want to follow something that that colin and holden were both mentioning because i think it's really important um dealpath was the category creator and now the leader in real estate deal management and is purpose built specifically for the work of these investment teams and historically uh teams have been forced to cobble together tools that weren't designed for their important work so whether that be you know using excel for you know pipeline reports or using word documents for due diligence checklists or various different file sharing services to house their transactional documents and emails and phone calls to communicate around those things um you know information has been scattered um and those workflows have been you know inconsistent and and tricky to to uh continue to coordinate people um there's also been you know great efforts to try to customize generic crm systems or or other things for this work which also hasn't resulted in the solution that people need so i think more than anything being designed for this work um has really you know enabled us to provide the the functionality um the ui and ux that that is really needed to be able to accomplish this work at scale um so you know i would maybe just take a a little step back again and look at some of the changes in real estate um where real estate has become institutionalized as a global asset class that's a fact and there's very clear economies of scale in real estate management um and uh bridge being a great kind of proof point of the efficiencies there and so as this market becomes uh more and more complex more competitive and operating at large scale you must have systems in place to do this work and that i think is really kind of the evolution that we're seeing is you know that move from cobbling together um tools that weren't designed for this work to really being able to um identify the needs and now the solutions available um to have the the right platforms in place to award here um and we've been you know working hard to first create this new category and build out our platform um and really drive um awareness and and uh interest and you know hear from the market what what their needs are and so you know bridge discovering deal path um i think is kind of that mutual work of bridge thinking about how to to build and scale their investment program um and deal path uh and other participants in the market you know really working hard to solve for those needs uh mike just very quickly you mentioned ui and ux those are this design software right that's right you know the user interface and user experience are so important um as it comes to adoption and engagement with software tools and solutions and this is you know one of many reasons why being purpose built for real estate investment is really really important we have designed a platform um that is specifically catering to colin and holden's needs not to a broad array of things we're not everything for everybody we want to build the best solution for institutional investors that are doing this important work you also mentioned just very quickly crm not familiar yeah that's an acronym for customer relationship management okay and um i think i'd like salesforce as a leader uh in this space um because another important part of real estate uh is managing your contacts the people and companies that that you work with um that is adjacent and different than your deal management and portfolio management um but they're related with each other okay uh back to colin and holden can you guys talk you've talked about some of the uh the organizational advantages of this of this technology but uh can you talk other specific advantages of using deal pass technology particularly during the last year how has it helped and do you think it how do you think it will help going forward you want to kick us off holden yeah so um yeah i've got a couple thoughts there um you know in terms of team coordination um obviously that became you know vital uh during the pandemic when we had we went from everyone being in the office every day uh to everyone working remotely for long stretches of time um so the ability to work uh within our teams uh on on deal path uh gave us the ability to you know in real time uh be up to date with where people were in the deal flow and in our processes so the team coordination aspect of deal path became paramount um you know ability to communicate back and forth i think an unexpected benefit of deal path that we weren't anticipating was just the ability to track history on deals um you know in the past we would track things in excel and then you know if we had to go find out what happened on a certain transaction or task we'd have to go search through our outlook emails other forms of communication to kind of get a history of what had happened deal path allows us to kind of track and keep all that information in one place so on a certain deal on a certain you know due diligence item for example we could have a history of what what we what documents we looked at what the what communication was back and forth and what happened um so that during the pandemic i think was um you know very vitally important for our team um and so you know other and unexpected benefits i think of the platform was uh mapping integration um which we had been doing you know with google earth or separately from the rest of our process um the user experience and deal path you know seamlessly integrates mapping technology with how we're tracking deals and how we're looking at things um you know other other things that we didn't anticipate we've kind of went from using deal path exclusively for our transaction platform to also using gilpath to manage our asset management processes um so yeah we found a lot of value add from from deal path outside of what we anticipated getting from the platform and the more we use deal path i think the more we see um you know the benefit of kind of keeping all of our processes you know consistent and and how in housed in kind of deal path so so i say those were kind of some of the main benefits that we saw during the pandemic and i just added you know i don't think we've i don't think we've experienced all the benefits that that we will um you know i think you will continue to evolve how we're using the data um you know we have a we've we've got a built out business intelligence team uh at our company and and they are using deal path data to continue to improve our data analysis and combine it with our operating data and and really come up with some pretty interesting stuff so you know i think we're just starting to scratch the surface of you know of the data that we've been able to house from i'm curious that mike can jump in here too how long did it take to integrate everything to get it up and running what's the timeline of something like this i i will defer to colin and hold on hold on what you want to take the holden's really he's he's worked with geopath a lot in building out you know as he said before we we had a pretty robust structure and a lot of templates that we worked with before but but holden's really been the architect of taking what we had built in excel and moving it over to deal past the holding you want to take this yeah so i think we've been using deal path for just over two years if i'm correct the onboarding i think it really depends on how custom uh built you know you want the platform and we as colin said we kind of had a very um well built out process checklists um how we were trying how we're tracking transactions so we wanted to really customize um the platform for us which is another benefit of deal path it's very you know it's very customizable i'm sure they've got you know solutions that you can integrate quickly for us um we're still integrating um it feels like um you know the integration wasn't difficult but we're just the more we use it the more value we see in it and the more we're bringing other processes into the fieldplat deal path platform so i think it just really depends on what the company is looking for if they're looking for a custom built solution um i'm sure deal path is is great at doing that um we've spent like i said we've spent a lot of time trying to custom customize it to how we want to see the data and how we how we kind of work through our deal flowing processes and i could maybe just follow that up because i think that um implementation is so important um for success uh change management is very hard um and uh we want to uh make sure that we're guiding a program that is going to help clients get the most value out of our platform um so when you sign up with dealpath we're going to assign uh an implementation team to your account um they're going to configure the accounts to your preferences reload the existing data that that you might have in a lot in the system and they're going to train your users both your admin users and your end users um and it is common and typical for us to have uh implementations that are 10 to 12 weeks long they can also be longer or shorter based on the the needs of particular firms you know bridge is an example of a very sophisticated large-scale firm that is utilizing a lot of capabilities and continuing to grow their firm and usage of deal path um and are thrilled to to partner with them um for the growth of their business uh how long have you been working with real estate companies in general particularly from the institutional side um you know really from the beginning i guess that's what we're designed for so i i would say you know since 2014 about seven years or so and um you know career-wise i started my career in real estate finance um a couple of decades ago um so it's been a while uh i want to ask also mike are there particular features of the technology that larger you know more diffuse companies might find beneficial um you know i think that the um high level things are probably similar between kind of the mid market and large scale of you know those themes of having centralized data um having these configurable workflows having that data security but with larger and larger teams brings more complexity and oftentimes higher needs around compliance and the administrative controls to uh be able to to configure and manage you know lots and lots of users across different teams um and um that's maybe where i would call out some of the differences um between some of the the largest institutions um and you know some smaller leaner teams that's gonna i mean again a question this is a question from somebody who might not know cloud technology that well does geography make a difference at all where teams are how big you know how big a footprint a company has for for dealpat's perspective um you know we view real estate as inherently a local and regional business uh we view capital as global um and right now the need is how do you connect global capital um with local and and regional real estate um so um this is very clearly a global business and global opportunity um and uh for practical reasons uh we will focus our efforts um on different segments of the market where we see kind of the highest net value um and today a majority of our clients are headquartered in north america and very quickly building out uh to support that global business in geographies both in emea and in apac okay i also want to ask this is for all three sir uh you i think it was colin who mentions the or hall who mentioned the speed of of the data of data sharing and uh the speed of communication that this sort of technology affords can you talk more about that you know the advantage of that i i think the part that i was talking about was the speed the speed of the data um and and how quickly things are moving and in our space you know we focus in the class b multi-family um suburban you know high growth markets and and there's been a lot of there's been a lot of movement in pricing in that space in the last five years um you know really 10 years and in what we saw we were we we historically had looked um at uh you know some some data from one of the brokerage companies and uh copyrighted you know cap rate information from you know from from the co-stars and the reese's of the world to see where where we thought you know they when they provide quarterly reports to to show where cap rate trends are going what we found is that that quarterly report was not keeping up with with the um with the transactions and so we were seeing you know cap rate movement um that that you know significantly outpaced what was being put forward by these third-party data providers and so we wanted to we wanted to house that information we you know cap rates based on our underwriting so we were looking at our noi versus you know the price that we knew the deal went for either because we bought it or because some we know you know what somebody else paid for it and and we had that information before the you know before the the the the property actually sold so we were able to get real life or we are able to get real-life real-time data on transaction activity which helps us make our decisions when we're looking at these markets so that's what i was referring to i'm not sure if there was there was something else regarding the speed i was going to ask about uh real-time aspects like what what information is desirable in real time like what and how does a technology like deal path provide that like what what is what what do you want in real time yeah so i i probably can address and and kind of speaking back to collins point um you know customizable reporting that's live within within our system um is very important so you know uh an end product of that was our sales comps in real time that we could pull everything we've underwritten up to the second essentially as long as the data has been you know put into the system we can pull custom reports for any region any any metro any kind of subset of data that we want to look at because essentially our teams are underwriting every deal in our target markets that fits our size and vintage profile so we just found that having our own internal place where we're tracking that data was was far better than the third-party resources that we were using um other situations where i think live you know updates and data are helpful is you know we could even be um you know as an example we'll have a weekly checklist meeting for deals that are under contract um i can be in that meeting and my analyst can be presenting what we've been what what's happened over the course of the week i can be in the system at the same time and even be scrolling ahead of them in the checklist you know if i see something that's i'm like oh we're done with that i can you know check that off in the system add a note and that literally updates pretty much before they scroll down to get to that that item so that's how you know how real time i i think the updates and and data within deal pass is so that's very powerful for our team just in terms of efficiency efficiency and communication and getting things done so as we're growing and looking at more deals and our team becomes bigger i think that'll just become more and more important for our team how does something like that work to be that fast is it an algorithm what do you how do you guys set that up um is the the question about you know how we're providing this real-time access yeah data um you know deal path is um a cloud-based application um that is designed for for collaboration um we ingest information from any place that you have access to it within deal path it's very well organized um and designed for collaboration and so you know as kind of holden and colin were both describing you know maybe from an aggregate level historically teams have had a investment committee meeting a pipeline meeting once a week and the team frantically scrambles to to organize all of the information for that meeting now the entire team always has access to the live pipeline and can drill down into the specific deals and see the latest version of the model the latest assumptions what's going on who's doing it um what's coming next uh etc um so uh this is you know one of the the many benefits of being a purpose-built cloud-based platform that you've got this kind of single source of truth that your data is is residing in and your team is able to appropriately access and add and collaborate together and again that is relevant when you're looking across a number of deals it's also relevant for a specific deal so as you know teammates might be spread out or working on various different things and projects um you were very easily easily able to go into a particular deal um understand all of the history of what's known about it where it's at today what's coming next who it's assigned to who's doing what when um so having that appropriate transparency that accountability and most of all access to the uh vetted data that is what is so important okay uh what as we venture past cover thank god um and given the economic boom underway what will be in demand technology wise from real estate companies what do you guys think on that on that front what aspects of technology will be in demand what what information will be particularly in demand and how to get it yeah i would maybe uh defer to colin and holden on you know how they're thinking about um the the future and what you know maybe some of their strategic priorities are i'm happy to to kind of share our perspective uh at deal path um as a vendor um but probably most interesting to hear kind of how bridge investment group is thinking about it so i think like you tom i'm hoping we get past pass covet in in the in the near future and we get back to you know having face-to-face meetings and and putting deals together on the road and all the stuff that we're used to doing but i think you know we're we we're an operating company at heart you know we're an operating company that became an investment company um so operations are are extremely important to us um i didn't mention before but you know we we have over 40 000 um apartment units in our portfolio we've got a an in-house property management team that that's the foundation you know really the foundation for our company and and i think what we'll see a lot um is is uh you know data becoming a uh significantly more important on the operation side um i think our property management platform is is looking at a lot of um as i mentioned before a lot of business business intelligence opportunities and and i think you know the size will matter in the abil the ability to leverage to to leverage that data um you know we've we've put together um you know our own pricing software um based on the you know the data that we've got and and and some really intelligent people in our company that have been able to figure out you know what we think to be a better algorithm than than some of the you know the off-the-shelf options um you know just you know as an example i mean a lot of the revenue management software is is uh is it's based off the airline model you know and and what we've realized is that you know it may be he may be better off to to keep your your you know your vacancy a little higher and hold out for a little bit higher rent um because you're you're signing annual leases so if you drop your rent like the airline model you're sacrificing a lot over you know over 12 months so in any case we've we've worked a lot on that side i think um you know again on on the operations side virtual tours have become more important i think that that will continue in the future um you know there's there's a lot of different options for for these virtual tours there's there's services that you know that that shows you know your apartment with your furniture in it and what it looks like and i think you know that'll become more and more important you know it's silly be it you know it doesn't seem like a big deal but but drones are becoming more important aerial photography is is more important at these assets selling you know being able to show a resident what their community looks like and we spend a lot of time um and effort on amenities you know we you know and that amenities may become bigger and bigger as you know is i think you know tertiary markets um will continue to grow i think you know i i do believe that that their office will come back and there's a strong story for office in a lot of different markets but there's no doubt that that work from home to some extent is here to stay so i think people people being able to live further from the office will drive growth to these uh you know more tertiary markets so so the amenities are important because because you know at these assets and and being able to sell that with with aerial photography from these drones will continue to become more and more important so you know there's a lot happening on the on the op side from from you know the title of this i think is you know deals and technology so you know you know here we are on zoom talking to each other like we're in a conference room so i think that'll continue to be important we have a lot of meeting with investors um you know virtually i hope we get you know more in person but i think you know i think this technology is here to stay and we'll continue to have a lot of face-to-face through the computer yeah i agree i mean i don't think that there's we're never going back that's for sure um and um real estate has always been driven by people with information um and that will continue to be true we just have access to so much more information now and we need to be able to process it accurately and quickly um and so i think that those themes continue from our perspective at deal path you know we believe that the future of real estate investment management will increasingly be more programmatic portfolio management and transaction execution but it's going to take a lot of work to get there and the first steps are how do we help organize and structure all of the data that these firms have and have access to and visualize it so they can be more data-driven in their decision-making and start automating some of the steps along the way and that's really what we've been marching towards um and you know really see a future ahead um where deal path is where the built world transacts online um and um that movement of uh transacting online is in flight now um and still a lot of work to to be able to unlock the the full value and potential there i want to ask okay so what's out you know we talked about what's in as far as technology and deal making going forward but what's out what's not as necessary what's not as in demand do you think um you know we don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about what doesn't matter um so i i'm not sure if i've got like uh really organized thoughts on what doesn't matter um but you know m keem to to kind of learn from colin and holden what you know is most important to them and you know what things that that they're seeing or interested in or where they see gaps um and you know are looking for better solutions lotus notes are out i do know that um i don't i i'm the same with you mike i you know i don't know what what i would say is out i would say what's what's important to us i mean we you know on the on the deal side we we use the software um that helps us analyze financials and analyze rent roll in a in a very timely consistent manner and we use deal path to help us house house all of our data you know i i can't think of anything that's that's you know that was in that's now out um you know i think excels you know we you know we we put down excel a few times in this call but it's still extremely important in our business we use it all the time um you know i don't know how did you have any thoughts no i mean uh you guys spoke to kind of the operational efficiencies and deal path i think that you know the data and transactional side um you know more so what's in there's not a lack of data in the world it's just there's a lack of efficiency in evaluating the correct data and that's kind of what we're trying to do we're trying to house all the important data that we need as a firm on the transaction specifically um and you know i've only been in this industry for eight years but this feels like the hottest transactional market i've ever seen um i don't know if it's been this way in the past but it just seems like our ability to quickly and efficiently analyze the data and and pick out the deals that are important to us and be efficient in you know pursuing those deals um is really important probably more so than it's been in the past um we're seeing deals that are coming out and being preemptively offered on really short marketing periods so the number of deals that we're looking at and our ability to quickly analyze the deals that we want to you know target and pursue is very important and vital for our company very important part to all this and as i mentioned before we've got a lot of different verticals and and offices around the around the country and you know for us we you know we want to be able to to bring all of this data that we've got in multi or office or senior housing and it and put it all together and so it's going to be really important for us in the going forward is to to name everything correctly so that we can tie it together and have you know be able to have you know consistent information that we can compile so that i think that'll be you know over the next you know the next project will really be making sure that we've got a consistent it's a consensus a consistent structure to our system it how short are some of these windows you were talking about they could be very short i mean two to three weeks on deals that are on market and then off market deals we may get you know someone reach out with a deal we need to analyze that and have kind of feedback within a couple days so the more data and the more live that that data can be um i think the more efficient our team is in evaluating those deals and and really hitting the opportunities that make sense okay uh we have about 10 minutes left and there's a couple questions from the audience um this is from mike uh how does dealpath handle data security um this is so so important um you know for our business we're supporting the largest institutional investment management firms in the world with their most important business information um so confidentiality and trust are kind of the foundation and core of our business and affects everything that we do um and um maybe uh among some of the important elements that that um you know we've invested in and provide is maintaining sock 2 type 2 compliance which is a very rigorous standard and we're audited on annually as well as the cyber grx tier 1 assessment and both of these things are evaluating our systems and our organization um or security for processing integrity and for confidentiality so there's a lot here to this question um and i'm happy as a follow-up um to to go into different areas and elements of it um but i would say that this is something that real estate um hasn't had to think about a lot previously how as so much of the proprietary information is being housed and managed in cloud services it's really critical that we quickly become proficient in thinking about and managing data security everyone is very excited to uh build data assets we've got to remember our balance sheets that there's also data liabilities and needs to to protect those things do you want to go into specifics really quick or um i think it's too broad of a topic unless there's a follow-up that that gives me direction yeah there's well there's this how can a user be confident that their data isn't shared with the competition right um good one sure um that is uh absolutely the core of our business which is the access rights um and and role based access controls um along with the ways in which we protect that data so uh we have a uh now significant operating history we've supported more than six trillion dollars of transactions we support hundreds of leading investors um and this is critical for every single one of them um so um you know we have um a very rigorous uh technical way of enforcing this um and beyond the technical solutions i would just say that you know for this profile that which many people on the phone you know are and represent um there's a very high standard for quality and a very low tolerance for unexpected experiences so really really important that deal path and other solutions are being great partners protecting that data and are representing that contractually in their agreements and are genuinely fulfilling on the controls necessary to do that so i think that this is a big important topic that was a very good way of putting it unexpected experiences and wanting to avoid them uh i i should have asked this for the beginning but holden and colin like how user-friendly do you find it was it easy to get up to speed after the integration after it was launched uh yeah i'd say uh integration was was great the user experience is is pretty simple um you know i think for even for the team members that aren't super tech savvy um it's very intuitive um and then the back end you know i think we do a lot of customization on our end um the back end interface at least for from an admin perspective um it is very intuitive and and deal path um provides a lot of support and training in our ability to go in and customize it so um you know i think we've done a quite a bit of the build out on our own uh with the support of deal path um but yeah i would say the user interface is great and that was a big value add for us when we were looking at other solutions um you know deal path was purpose built for real estate transactions so the platform is already kind of geared towards that um which was very helpful okay um and i don't know if you get you mentioned earlier you both mentioned earlier uh that that bridge works in workforce housing i know there's some people watching who might want to know you know what what markets are in the united states are particularly um advantageous or hot or you know desirable as far as you know investment in workforce housing we we spend a lot of time our our footprint is really in in these high growth sun belt markets uh southeast southwest um but you know we i would say our footprint is we used to call it the crooked smile it's not looking more like a smile but we you know we've got stuff in the in the pacific northwest through california you know down through the southwest arizona nevada salt lake um texas markets uh denver boulder area and then you know um florida atlanta carolina's all the way up to the dc suburbs um so but we we spend a lot as another you know use of data we spend a lot of time following following demographics and we have for for a while um you know and it's there's a pretty consistent theme that i'm sure is not surprising to everyone in this call there's a pretty consistency theme to from seeing movement from the you know the northeast um midwest down to these lower cost lower tax markets we're seeing business and population growth in these markets so that's that's where we spend most of our time right i'm uh i'm i'm coming at you from boston and there was one workforce development a couple years ago it was like the moon landing because so many different things had to come together to make it happen because the costs were so high but all right that's part of it the cost to build workforce housing is prohibitive and and it didn't help it doesn't help that lumber's up 300 percent since since the start of the pandemic so yeah there's a need for this this product which is why we you know we we go in and we we renovate and and we provide what i believe to be very high quality housing at a significant discount to to newly built assets uh okay okay i want to thank everyone for tuning in i want to thank colin apple and holden latimer from bridge investment group and mike shiroka from deal path and thank you and i want to thank our sponsor deopath and encourage everyone to tune in again for other commercial observer power briefings thanks guys thanks everybody thanks tom thank you you