SAN FRANCISCO—Dealpath is a deal management platform designed for commercial real estate investment teams. In this exclusive, Mike Sroka, CEO of San Francisco-based Dealpath, recently shared his insights into the state of real estate tech and where it may be headed.
GlobeSt.com: What do you see as the next big thing in CRE and technology?
Sroka: A recent surge in the investment, development and adoption of new, purpose-built software for CRE has created a rich landscape of best-in-class software point solutions. With this, there is a great need for integrations between tools and open platforms designed for interoperability. The future of CRE technology lies in interconnected systems that enable new, actionable insights through data visualizations, the automation of repetitive administrative tasks, and more programmatic portfolio management and transaction execution.
GlobeSt.com: What other tech trends are prevalent that the average CRE professional may not know about?
Sroka: Analytics are why we built Dealpath. We're excited to increasingly hear that word analytics being used by investment teams. To us, analytics is a turbo-charged version of reporting that implies more emphasis on visualizing and structuring data for the purpose of gleaning actionable insights. These new insights can inform decisions that affect future outcomes. That's why we're big believers in data-driven decision-making. This requires instrumenting for the collection of relevant data, structuring data in a recognizable way for re-use, and effectively querying data and analyzing results.
GlobeSt.com: What is Dealpath's mission with regard to the industry, i.e. what void is it filling?
Sroka: We empower institutional real estate investment teams with purpose-built software solutions engineered to generate optimal risk-adjusted returns. We want the industry to move past the days when low-level administrative work and constantly waiting on people were the norm. Dealpath is the command center for high-performance investment teams, and it puts the information they need at their fingertips.
GlobeSt.com: What companies are your early adopters?
Sroka: We're fortunate to have very quickly received support from a few hundred firms already, and we're growing rapidly. These firms work across all deal types (acquisitions, development, and financing), all property types (office, industrial, retail, multifamily, etc.), all deal sizes (million-dollar deals to multi-billion dollar deals) and all tax structures (REIT, PERE, etc.).
GlobeSt.com: What is the biggest industry pain point that attracts new users to Dealpath?
Sroka: There has been a broken workflow in how deals are evaluated and executed. In an increasingly competitive and complex marketplace and an institutional asset class, a solution has become a requirement.
GlobeSt.com: CRE is a very traditional industry. What hurdles do you face when getting a company to adopt technology?
Sroka: Change management is always hard. With a clear and compelling value proposition, validation of success with comparables and an approach to user adoption that is proven to be successful, it get easier with compounding effects.
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Lisa Brown
Lisa Brown is an editor for the south and west regions of GlobeSt.com. She has 25-plus years of real estate experience, with a regional PR role at Grubb & Ellis and a national communications position at MMI. Brown also spent 10 years as executive director at NAIOP San Francisco Bay Area chapter, where she led the organization to achieving its first national award honors and recognition on Capitol Hill. She has written extensively on commercial real estate topics and edited numerous pieces on the subject.
