Art & Science — why we’re a tech-enabled capital advisory

I’m trying to think of a type of company, or an industry, that won’t be dominated by technology companies within the next four decades.

I can’t do it.

With the rise of the internet, the growing influence of generations born with it, and the impending expansion of real artificial intelligence, no industry is beyond the reach of tech-minded companies, or increasingly, tech start-ups.

But as technology rises, people don’t become less valuable. My first real job out of college was with Google, who now employs over 100,000 people globally. These are not 100,000 people that they hired away from other internet companies. Most of them are net new jobs, created by Google who has defined a new category of company.

The truth is that technology makes people more productive.

The science of commercial real estate lending

Modern software technology is really good at scientific tasks. Data handling, calculation, and repeatable logic are firmly within tech’s domain, and failing to leverage that fact, leaving sub-human tasks for your employees, will erode the talent of traditional companies. Data entry through fingers, structured information exchange through voice, and common calculations through manual (or spreadsheet-assisted) number-crunching are enemies of productivity.

In commercial mortgage brokerage, these tasks look like:

• Copying and pasting property and market info into a PDF, and then sending that PDF to a dozen lenders, essentially asking them to then copy and paste the same information again into their own format.
• Creating the same loan matrix from scratch in excel for every, single, deal.
• Re-recording the same deal information, not to bring the deal forward with a client, but simply because they need to have a record of something they’ve already done in some management-required CRM.

Our capital advisors don’t spend time doing these things, nor do they need to format text, take a screenshot of a property in google maps, or open up six websites to collect market statistics. These things are hard tasks — our technology can do them all, faster and better than our humans can.

The art of commercial real estate lending

So what do our capital advisors focus on?

Managing client relationships, and closing great loans. These people are in the capital markets, working on debt deals, every single day. They:

• Provide context on the market and manage a borrower’s loan expectations.
• Explain the differences between multiple lenders; things that wouldn’t appear on the term sheet.
• Provide accountability to both lender and borrower alike, boosting trust in the transaction.
• Sell the deal and boost a lender’s confidence for a good borrower that may not be able to nail the communication themselves.
• Structure the ideal financing terms for the transaction and eliminate any and all obstacles to getting the best loan quoted, committed, and closed.

There are hundreds of things that can happen in a commercial real estate deal. An increasing number of those factors are being distilled down to a science. Maybe a vast artificial intelligence will nail it all without humans some day. But that’s not close yet — human beings reign supreme on the soft side of any business, even finance.

We’re building an awesome team

So we’re building an awesome team of capital advisors, and doing everything within our power to enable them to become the most effective loan advisors in the industry. Here are some of our newest team members:

Gunnar Wilmot

Gunnar joined StackSource in New York, coming in with several years of experience as a commercial mortgage broker with Marcus & Millichap. Gunnar has worked on financing multifamily, retail, industrial, and hospitality transactions.

Sarah Rallo

Sarah also joins the NYC squad. Prior to StackSource, Sarah has several years of industry experience, particularly within the CMBS world. She’s active in the CREFC Women’s Network.

Carlton Roark

Carlton joins StackSource in San Diego, our first team member in Southern California. He brings a wealth of experience to the team, having served as a loan officer in the industry for more than 25 years for a range of financial institutions.

Who’s joining us next? We’re hiring in Dallas (or Houston), Chicago, DC, Miami, and, of course, New York. If you’re interested in helping us build this next generation commercial mortgage platform as an originator, get in touch!