Ascendix Tech's Proptech Journey: Lessons Learned over 2 Decades of Innovation

Some seem to effortlessly get into #proptech and start thriving businesses in a blink of an eye, which is great - the world's biggest industry has been long ripe for disruption.

However, this is not our story.

For Ascendix, it was an almost 3-decades-long path of ups and downs that started in Dallas, Texas back in 1996 with our CRM practice and a vision to digitally transform the industries that suffered from opaque systems and processes.

CRM software and business automation have always been our focal point but we never really focused on real estate specifically.

The Turning Point

A pivotal moment in our proptech journey, as we call it now, happened when we stumbled into a small slice of commercial estate, which is in fact a very broad market - private REITs - with more than 500 incumbents at that time.?

A private REIT is a real estate investment trust that is privately owned, not publicly traded, and typically offered only to accredited investors who invest in real estate properties together.

So one of those trusts reached out to us for a solution that would make sure all their partner brokers were certified. And because by that time, we had already established ourselves as leaders in workflow automation for other industries, we eagerly accepted the challenge.

We developed a tailored solution that substituted the manual review process and packaged it into a handy and straightforward platform. Whenever a request was made to send documents such as an application or order, our system would check if all parties involved were properly certified. If any of the required checkboxes was missing, the system would trigger warning signals and prevent the order from being fulfilled.

This experience marked a turning point for Ascendix, as we realized the immense potential for workflow automation in the real estate industry. We also discovered that our prior experience in CRM and business automation was invaluable in developing solutions for REITs and other CRE domains. With this realization, we began to dive deeper into real estate and their challenges.

Word of a Mouth

One interesting thing about REITs is that once these companies acquire buildings, they usually create a fund and sell shares to investors.

Once all the shares are sold, they don't typically take any action until they can acquire new buildings and create a new fund.

This often results in the layoff of salespeople who then go to other private REIT companies. And these people started telling their new employers about us, saying that at their previous workplace, they utilized software that facilitated most of their operations they traditionally do manually.

It helped us find customers without having to do a lot of marketing and the big point was that these companies didn't have to teach us their business model. We already knew it.

Getting Exposure to Other CRE Areas

Some REITs employed their own leasing agents who were responsible for finding tenants to lease the space in the buildings they had purchased for their business.

And luckily for us, one of our clients for whom we had developed a solution to manage their investment workflow also needed help with their lease process.

This prompted them to request additional functionality to be added to the system, so that they could manage everything on a single platform, rather than having two separate systems.

Thanks to our excellent track record of successful collaboration and our team's expertise in the client's workflow, we were the ideal technology partner to develop a tailor-made solution for their lease management needs.

That is how we got hands-on exposure to a wider CRE community of property managers and brokers as well as their business challenges.

Our First Endeavours on Product Development

It was another couple of years until we finally realized that some of our services could be packaged in a handy solution that would work for 9/10 challenges CRE brokers were facing.

We were deliberately addressing brokers as we saw that that particular area of CRE was the most underserved by technology. If REITs were already familiar with some simple technology tools, agents still heavily relied on the hand-shake and notebooks.

So, around 2001-2002 we initiated this process of product development and it was probably around 2004 when we built our first versions.

It was the time when workflow automation tools were just being introduced with some veterans like Sales Logic, which we eventually ended up using as our product infrastructure back then.

However, when Microsoft presented its very first CRM system - Dynamics 365 - we realized that tool was going to be loved by brokers, just as Outlook and Excel were at that time, and notably, our product was already getting mature - actually too mature for that simple infrastructure of Sales Logic. So, soon enough we migrated our product to Dynamics 365, got it certified by Microsoft, and released it to the wider community of brokers.

As we had guessed, getting a product that was powered by the world's most advanced workflow automation software was a success.

This is how our first real estate focused product was born – Real Estate Advantage back then and simply AscendixRE today.

Challenges and Hurdles We Faced

But don't get me wrong, our proptech journey wasn't always smooth sailing, and there were times when we had to pivot and adjust our approach to meet market needs.

For instance, we had to transition from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions to keep up with changing industry trends. We also had to migrate our solutions once again - this time to Salesforce - due to some inefficiencies we were facing on Dynamics (but that's probably a subject for a different post on why we eventually chose Salesforce over Dynamics).

Another challenge we faced was the slow adoption rate of technology in the real estate industry. It took some time for brokers and other stakeholders to see the value in using technology to streamline their operations, and we had to work hard to educate them and demonstrate the benefits of our solutions.

Despite the challenges, we remained focused on our goal of digitally transforming the real estate industry and continued to innovate and improve our products.

Where We Stand Now & What We Learnt

Another decade of hard work fuelled by our ambitions to innovate real estate with proptech, and here we stand today – a global real estate tech transformation consultancy with 5 offices worldwide, some of the most recognized clients on portfolio, like JLL and Colliers, and more than 17 own products.

Through our journey in proptech, we learned several important lessons.

1. Product development is not like providing services, where you invoice somebody every month for the work you have done. When you're building a product, you're doing this with no income. So, it is very important to have a clear vision of your product, real estate domain it will be aimed at, and what real-life problems it is going to solve. Without even a rough roadmap, your project may become an endless endeavor, draining your time and resources with no feasible results.
2. Once you've decided to develop a proptech solution, or actually any solution at all, you need to focus on this wholeheartedly. When we were considering developing our own product for real estate brokers - AscendixRE - our developer and I separated ourselves from everything else going on in the company and wholeheartedly focused just on this solution. And it took us 4 months of hard work to get the first version of our brokerage-faced CRM pretty much ready.
3. Experience. Experience. Experience. We would not have been been able to develop an industry-specific tool without prior exposure to?#realestate?sectors - REITs, property managers and then brokers. But this took us 2 decades to gain this expertise. You can walk the same path we did until we got confident in our capabilities ti build real estate tech products and provide professional services - or you can leverage what we have already learned and thus get up to speed on proptech much quicker.

In conclusion, Ascendix's journey in proptech has been a long and challenging one, but it has taught us valuable lessons and helped us become a global leader in real estate tech transformation. We are proud of our achievements and excited about the future of proptech, and we look forward to continuing to innovate and disrupt the industry for many years to come.?

If you want to learn more about our path in proptech or considering developing your own product, book a FREE Proptech Strategy Call: https://lnkd.in/g9N2DDi5?