REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY
RealFoundations | June 03, 2022
RealFoundations, one of the world's foremost providers of consulting and managed services for the real estate industry, announced the launch of its new Investor Sector Practice Group, which aims to help investors and investment managers elevate their real estate assets and drive improved returns.
Investors and investment managers are challenged by insufficient modeling capabilities, unstructured information sharing, limited technology integrations and the inability to report portfolio performance quickly, accurately, and with consistency across various metrics. RealFoundations' Investor Sector Practice Group provides a forum for industry leaders to openly discuss the pain points, technologies, and leading practices that span business functions such as Capital Management, Fund and Portfolio Management and Accounting, Asset Management, and Property Operations, Development, Enterprise Strategy, and Governance.
The Practice Group and its Advisory Panel, comprised of passionate real estate professionals with significant experience in the Investment Management sector, focus on designing an industry-leading model that enables investment managers to effectively:
Monitor performance across their portfolio from underwriting through disposition,
Report portfolio diversification across various metrics,
Measure and monitor all leases and leasing activity across their portfolio,
Analyze debt exposure by fund, asset, and lender,
Respond to internal and external ad-hoc inquiries using readily available applications and data, and
Forecast and model portfolio performance based on various scenarios.
With over 200 years of combined experience transforming the way investors and investment managers work across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, RealFoundations has delivered actionable insights to the top 5 ranked firms, as well as 13 of the top 25 ranked firms, recognized by IPE Real Assets in their top 150 Real Estate Investment Managers list.
Our Investor Practice Group partners with real estate firms to implement improved decision-making capabilities which ultimately leads to greater portfolio returns. Our practitioners have years of experience in the real estate investment sector which enables us to quickly evaluate companies' operating platforms and recommend enhancements to streamline efficiency and increase profitability."
Brent McFerren, Enterprise Managing Consultant, RealFoundations
The Investor Sector Practice Group levers RealFoundations' long-running relationships with organizations such as IREI, NAREIM, NCREIF and PREA, along with its accumulated expertise and foremost knowledge of leading practices and technologies to offer value-add problem-solving strategies to the industry, furthering its mission to make real estate run better.
About RealFoundations
RealFoundations is the world's foremost professional services firm focused solely on the real estate industry. Through our delivery of Management Consulting and Managed Services, we help companies that develop, own, operate, service or invest in real estate make better, more profitable decisions. We are proud partners to over 450 real estate companies around the globe, providing accelerated solutions that solve some of real estate's most complex challenges. We Make Real Estate Run Better.
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REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
Evernest | July 01, 2022
Evernest, a national, full-service real estate and property management firm, announced a merger with three divisions of Virginia-based Dodson Property Management. The merger will bring Dodson's divisions overseeing single-family property management, small multi-family buildings, and association management into the Evernest portfolio.
The merger includes Dodson's entire single-family portfolio of 2,450 units; 1,100 units under its Portfolio Management division of smaller multi-family buildings; and all Association Management operations, encompassing 170 associations and 15,000 units. The names of the divisions will change to Evernest.
The merger is Evernest's largest to date, and adds roughly 3,550 single-family homes and small multi-family units to Evernest's portfolio. The deal boosts Evernest's overall portfolio to more than 11,000 single-family homes and apartments under management nationwide and positions Evernest as one of the largest single-family and small multi-family real estate and property management firms in America. Additionally, the deal moves Evernest into the management of homeowners and condominium associations in Virginia and Florida.
This merger is really the culmination of two companies that have a similar culture, a similar tech platform, and similar teams that have built legacies in large-scale, single-family property management. A combined company will add value to Dodson and Evernest clients through shared resources, shared values, and shared systems."
Matthew Whitaker, Evernest Founder and CEO
The merger with Dodson places Evernest's property management and brokerage services into four new single-family markets: Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Williamsburg, Va., as well as Northern Virginia. Dodson has association management operations in Richmond, Northern Virginia, Williamsburg, and Sarasota, Fla. These markets add to the 18 national regions already served by Evernest's elite team of property managers and real estate brokers. Like Dodson, Evernest has focused in recent years on acquiring and merging operations to grow and better support owners and residents. The Dodson merger comes on the heels of 21 previous deals, either mergers or outright acquisitions, made by Evernest. Dodson is one of five deals Evernest has made in the second quarter of 2022 alone.
"We have a vision for our own company's growth, and felt scale was necessary to build the best leadership team in the industry and to provide our residents and clients with all of the resources possible to ensure that they have a quality experience," said Duke Dodson, President and CEO of Dodson Companies. "We're extremely close with Matthew and the team at Evernest and have worked together over the years to build our businesses from the ground up, share best practices, and help one another grow, so we felt very comfortable in taking this big step to come together as one."
Dodson's existing leadership, operations, and property/association management teams will remain in place in the markets the company serves. Both property owners and residents will experience a seamless transition, maintain the same team members they know, and see continually improving processes and systems. Publicly, Dodson signage will change to Evernest. Dodson's Commercial, Development and short-term rental divisions remain independent and are not included in the Evernest merger.
Adds Whitaker: "As we expand into Virginia, and join forces with the Dodson team, we're excited to help residents, owners, and investors achieve their real estate goals and show them what a great property and association management company can be."
About Evernest
Based in Birmingham, Ala., Evernest operates in 25 real estate markets across the country. It is one of the nation's largest single-family and small multi-family investment broker and property management provider. The firm manages more than 11,000 homes for over 4,100 owners, brokers more than 1,000 investment deals annually, and has made the Inc5000 list five of the last six years.
About the Dodson Companies
Dodson was founded in 2007 as a property management and real estate company dedicated to the needs of investor owners and tenants. Today, Dodson operates a commercial property management and brokerage division, Dodson Commercial; a real estate development group, Dodson Development; and a short-term rental management division.
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REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY
LightBox | July 13, 2022
LightBox, a leading information and technology platform for commercial real estate and location-based intelligence, announced the launch of the LightBox Data Platform. The platform serves as the most complete, connected data solution in the market bringing together third-party, public and customer data with LightBox proprietary content in a consistent data model for straightforward onboarding and integration. Clients can now use the newly launched Developer Portal to discover and connect to the full breadth and depth of LightBox data using a unified API and the LightBox ID, a permanent identifier that creates powerful connections to LightBox’s information model and allows users to easily identify relationships across LightBox’s property graph.
LightBox’s expanding suite of APIs, data solutions and professional service offerings provide companies the flexibility to determine what solutions scale best to enable businesses and industries to make strategically sound decisions in broadband modeling, site selection, property research, portfolio management, risk analysis and more.
LightBox SmartFabric™ will serve as the foundational dataset for the platform. SmartFabric brings together geospatial and non-geospatial datasets in a proprietary connected model. It provides customers with the insights and relationships across LightBox’s core parcel, building footprints, addressing, property characteristics, transactions, and other datasets for a complete view of a property.
“The LightBox Data Platform builds on our strong data management capabilities and demonstrates the openness and connectivity we need to develop as an industry, The demand for data remains unabated, clients continue to look for a competitive edge through data, and we are innovating to meet the demand. Our new APIs coupled with LightBox’s identifier and geocoder provides customers with the connected data solution that they are looking for.”
-Eric Frank, Chief Executive Officer at LightBox.
The real estate industry’s desire to access and append more data has been growing at an exponential rate. Data management is a difficult process in the era of big data and a one size approach does not fit all, said Adam Cardarelli, Vice President of Product Management at LightBox. Users need the technological components to access and manage data according to their own specifications. The LightBox Data Platform will consistently deliver a diverse body of APIs and data in a usable fashion. It will meet the needs of everybody in the industry—buyers, sellers, lenders, appraisers, environmental professionals, and more—who can scale it according to need.
LightBox’s APIs are now available through the LightBox Developer Portal allowing users to explore the catalog, discover new solutions, access sample code, and connect with other LightBox users in forums to gain input and insight about their business challenges. Developers will be able to discover LightBox APIs and LightBox data, with enough documentation and samples to put the system to immediate use however they require. The portal features over 75 endpoints with more being continuously added.
About LightBox-
LightBox is a leading real estate information and technology platform. Through operational excellence and a passion for innovation, LightBox facilitates transparency, efficiency, insight, and prediction for real estate investment and location analytics. LightBox customers include commercial and government agencies requiring definitive real estate data and powerful workflow solutions, including brokers, developers, investors, lenders, insurers, technology providers, environmental consultants, and valuation professionals. LightBox is backed by Silver Lake and Battery Ventures.
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