It’s amazing what happens when you bring together a former real estate finance executive, a former commercial real estate attorney, a great software development team and a founder with 32 years in the title business who has his heart set on transforming the commercial real estate deal closing process. That’s the origin of ProDeal, a Manhattan-based software company that’s transforming the complex and chaotic commercial real estate closings into a simple, fast and scalable process. In just under three short years, ProDeal has helped the commercial real estate community seamlessly close more than $45 billion in transactions facilitated by customers including Fortress Investment Group, Paul Hastings, Silverstein, Emerald Creek Capital, RCN Capital, and AmTrust.
What Exactly is ProDeal?
ProDeal is the only commercial real estate tech platform built for the business to business needs of lenders, borrowers, title companies, mortgage brokers, and lawyers. ProDeal’s software platform combines deal communications, document sharing, and a real-time closing checklist all in a secure and user-friendly digital room that has changed the way commercial real estate deals are getting closed across asset types and up and down the capital stack.
Changing how the real estate finance and private lending community transacts was ProDeal’s mission from the get-go: close more deals in a shorter period of time, replace lengthy email chains, eliminate unproductive conference calls, get rid of spreadsheet closing checklists and say goodbye to cluttered data rooms designed for M&A buyer due diligence. Essentially, provide real estate professionals with software for work that matches the type of efficiency and user experience we expect outside of work from sites like Uber and AirBnb. Simple, clean, and powerful.
Let’s take a peek behind the curtain at ProDeal, a company that’s thriving and on the forefront of deploying technology that is transforming the deal closing process from the old way to a much better way. This past month, we had the opportunity to catch up with Ian Group, ProDeal’s Head of Customer Success; Patrick Janson, the company’s Chief Operations Officer; and Andrew Damico, ProDeal’s recently appointed Chief Executive Officer to discuss what makes ProDeal such a unique company with the added ambition of helping the real estate finance community navigate complications arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and their vision and outlook for the future of the company and product.
Turning Experience into Value
Patrick Janson has a very unique perspective given he’s spent over ten years working in a number of positions in commercial real estate finance and technology. Patrick has been a loan originator with a NY-based credit fund, a marketing guru in the private lending community, a software developer, and product designer.. Patrick was introduced to ProDeal’s Founder Michael Bebon 3 years ago and realized it’s potential. “I saw the ProDeal platform and thought it was something that could change the way commercial real estate closes deals,” recounted Patrick, “Since that time, we have recruited a collection of real estate, legal, and technology experts from all over the world to build a platform and company to see that transformation through.”
Since 2017, ProDeal has assisted over 700 entities complete commercial real estate transactions across all asset types. The ProDeal platform is extremely versatile and easy to use, as Patrick explained: “It’s an intuitive SaaS-based platform, so it’s accessible via the web or your iPhone and can be easily adopted by business professionals in just a few minutes.”
ProDeal improves deal closing efficiency by ensuring all deal participants are sharing the same documents and the same checklist items in a secure shared deal room in the cloud. “ProDeal offers a centralized web-based closing platform,” said Patrick, “It takes the three tools used to close real estate transactions including a closing checklist, a data room to store and exchange documents and a centralized communications tool that helps with eliminating mass emails. With ProDeal, checklist calls are done online in a fraction of the time, ensuring everyone is viewing the right document and correct status of each item in the closing checklist.”
ProDeal enables its users to complete a variety of tasks all in a seamless and secure collaborative deal room including:
- Gathering stakeholders: Clients can create customized deal rooms and invite all the parties on a deal to ProDeal with a single click of their mouse for a quick sign-up
- Managing checklists: Users are able to track ongoing tasks and pertinent documents using a simple and intuitive online checklist that is updated in real-time
- Distributing documents securely: ProDeal makes uploading, reviewing, and keeping track of multiple versions of documents
- Eliminating cluttered inboxes: Users can replace messy and disorganized email chains with secure, real-time messaging to enhance the flow of deal communications
Prioritizing User Experience
Providing an organized deal closing platform isn’t the only appealing aspect of the ProDeal platform. All of ProDeal’s features and capabilities would be under utilized, if clients didn’t find the platform simple and easy to use, as Andrew pointed out: “Our customers find ProDeal’s interface very intuitive. Even infrequent users who periodically access ProDeal during a deal closing can find the checklist status, their assigned tasks, and associated documents–the ProDeal checklist looks just like the checklists they use today in Excel or Word but it is accessible online and updated in real time keeping everyone on the same page. Our users can adopt the tool in minutes.”
The fact that ProDeal is intuitive and is implemented in minutes is directly attributable to the deep experience and domain knowledge of the team that designed, built, and supports the platform. “It’s not just about having great software that addresses a need,” Andrew is quick to point out. “It’s also about having domain expertise and a customer success team that understands the deal closing process. We understand the industry and the pain points very well which allows us to meet the unique needs of our customers.”
Going the extra mile for our customers is well worth the effort, it’s all about delighting our customers. It allows us to develop an intimate relationship with customers and build things that they really need and want,” explained Andrew, “It’s instant gratification when we build out a new capability and it gets immediately adopted and used by our clients. Tailoring the user experience to accommodate less tech-savvy clients is what we’re all about. Sometimes all a deal participant is required to do is to upload a single document,” Andrew shared “and so the team came up with an idea of being able to securely email documents (file attachments) into a ProDeal folder so that the deal administrator can review the file, associate it with the right checklist item, and mark it closed.”
ProDeal’s clients play every role in a real estate deal from law firm partners to title insurance underwriters to capital providers. The diverse nature of their user base means that ProDeal has to be user friendly for tech savvy firms as well as companies that have yet to go through a digital transformation. The focus on user experiences is what initially drew ProDeal’s current Head of Customer Service, Ian Group to get involved with the company back in 2018. Ian first encountered the ProDeal platform while working as a commercial real estate attorney: “I had just closed a $1 billion refinance transaction and it was really complicated. There were a lot of moving pieces and documents and we were working with another law firm on the same side of the transaction. I would have loved a platform like ProDeal, it would have streamlined everything tremendously and provided a great experience for everyone on the deal team.”
Navigating the Challenges of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has completely transformed how businesses are operating and the private lending industry is no exception. ProDeal has facilitated the transition to remote based operations for the ProDeal staff and are looking to help other companies make the same transition to a remote first workplace. “Over the past three years, we’ve built a distributed team and an agile remote working culture,” Patrick explained. “This has allowed us to take many of our remote working best practices and include them in our product design philosophy. As a result, our clients are well positioned to continue their operations without any issues or friction while working from home.”
With privacy concerns at an all-time high, especially with the increased reliance on web-based applications, cybersecurity is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. ProDeal’s technology team was very diligent and thoughtful about implementing robust security features on the platform. The software offers clients the security of encrypted email plus additional security in the form of multi-factor authentication, best-in-class encryption for data in transit and at rest, suspicious activity monitoring, user permissions controls, and transparent event logging. ProDeal clients can rest assured that their sensitive information is adequately safeguarded at all times.
The company saw the coronavirus epidemic as an opportunity to assist the private lending and the commercial real estate community. “Our private lending clients are small businesses with limited resources making it harder for them to transition to a WFH environment. We are laser focused on helping them with this transition in a seamless and secure manner by leveraging ProDeal”, explained Andrew.
ProDeal wanted to “lead from the front” and help the community and their employees navigate the transitional period to remote work. Patrick explained, “I think right now the general ethos and mindset of the entire industry is that we have to lean into adopting technology. We have to lean into online collaboration platforms like ProDeal, in order to adapt to the new normal of not being able to walk down the hall and work on a deal with a colleague.”
As far as the future of the product, ProDeal is striving to completely transform commercial real estate finance deal management and is continuously engaged in user research with a host of leading firms in real estate to design features that will optimize workflows and provide immediate value to their users. “We have a well researched product roadmap,” Patrick shared. “Our technical team has been working together for over three years on the platform and has designed an innovative set of new features coming out between now and year end. We continue to work toward our goal of becoming the “best in class” platform for helping the commercial real estate community run their entire closing process. But we’re not stopping there, we want to help the commercial real estate community manage assets, report to investors and perform loan pool monitoring and workouts”.
To support their ambitious plans, ProDeal is an agile company with a unifying set of corporate values, something the company’s leadership holds to be key to their success and management philosophy. “There’s a big emphasis here on being a workplace of choice and destination,” Patrick explained. “One example is we run a mindfulness program for our staff to help them cope with the additional stress brought on by COVID-19 and to learn to hold better space for collaboration with their colleagues even in times of pressure and stress. We also run a ton of education and cross-department training. Our close-knit culture results in a high quality end product for ProDeal users”, as Patrick put it. “Based on the feedback we get from our clients, it’s easy for them to perceive our culture and come away from the experience of interacting with us realizing that ProDeal is both a software platform as well as an inclusive and diverse team of people committed to the success of our customers in the private lending community and more broadly, the commercial real estate community as a whole.”
