The details of every deal are unique, and each transaction carries a life of its own. However, while the properties are distinct, the process you go through to acquire or develop these assets often follows a similar pattern. From sourcing and underwriting through due diligence and closing, the steps are generally predictable. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for every deal. Instead, real estate investment teams should institute repeatable workflows with a goal to streamline real estate deals.
The first step is to document the tasks and assets you need as you move through a deal. When do you typically submit your LOI? Who will take care of the PSA? What resources do you allocate to due diligence surveys? How do you collaborate with your architects and construction crew? What data do you need to accurately calculate your expected IRR and NOI?
Of course, you can answer these questions and complete these tasks as they arise. But if you know ahead of time what’s coming and who’s responsible, you’ll both save time and reduce errors.
Keep in mind how you’ll document your process too. Excel spreadsheets work, but most of today’s real estate investors are opting for powerful, cloud-based platforms instead. They help you build repeatable workflows that are always accessible, and crucially, are flexible and customizable. No matter how standardized your process is, you need the flexibility to skip tasks that aren’t applicable and add new, ad hoc tasks.
As you document and begin to use and re-use your workflows, you’ll likely find bottlenecks that you wouldn’t have known about otherwise and opportunities for introducing new efficiencies that would have gone unnoticed. In doing this exercise, you’ll hopefully gain a nuanced understanding of your process and discover new ways to streamline it.
Dealpath was built exclusively for exactly this purpose. Real estate investors and developers leverage Dealpath to build repeatable and customized workflows. Through customer surveys and thousands of data points, we’ve calculated that Dealpath users save an average of 20% of their time every week that they reallocate to value-add tasks.
If you’d like to learn more about how to streamline a real estate deal, we’d be happy to set you up with a customized demo. Otherwise, we hope this can inspire you to take another look at your existing process and consider where it can benefit from repeatable workflows.
