Making Money
in a Competitive Space:
In commercial real estate, NNN high-credit properties are highly-competitive and usually long-term holds by high cash individuals. These properties are acquired to park money in the long-term, without any genuine interest in maximizing gains for their investment.
For this reason, one of the primary plays in CRE is to transform low-value leases into high-value opportunities. For example, converting a 3-year short-term lease from a small franchisee credit guarantee into a 25-year long-term lease with a corporate guarantee. You’ll need to negotiate coterminous contracts with the franchisor, franchisee, and seller. It’s challenging to find non-competitive opportunities and align all parties on the long-term goals.
Salesforce,
Done the Right Way:
Fortunately, data are abundant within the commercial real estate world. Although collecting accurate data can be both complicated and time-consuming, once you’ve collected everything, there’s a lot you can do with it. So Bright Development was tasked to create a Salesforce environment to house all of the data, develop an algorithm to determine high-quality leads, and create an environment for associates to make calls and process deals quickly.
Organizing the data within Salesforce is easy enough. Still, the difficulty lies in the compromise between housing data and creating an environment for associates to complete their day-to-day work. They need data to make decisions and have high-quality conversations with potential sellers. But, overwhelming the associates with data causes mental fatigue and can quickly wear out associates. We worked directly with the management team and associates to curate a perfect experience for their daily workflow to solve this problem.
Once everyone was happy with their day-to-day flow, we began constructing an algorithm within Salesforce. This process is more complicated than you’d think, as Salesforce generally doesn’t want you to do this. They offer an out-of-the-box solution to solve such problems, but it’s pretty limited in what it can do. To create this algorithm, we wrote custom Apex code within the developer’s portal to update the algorithm daily and provide an updated list of potential sellers for the associates to call. This algorithm required a lot of back-and-forth between the two teams and is still a work in progress as we learn more.
20x Your Effectiveness:
Before working with Bright Development, Ocean Block Capital acquired less than $10MM in CRE manually, but easily 20x
within 1-year of building the Salesforce platform. They’ve since doubled their associate team and continue to grow every month.