How an Objective Risk Model Helps Overcome Biases

This article was originally posted on Origin Investments’ blog.

The human mind is wired to make quick, instinctive decisions, resulting in biases. I recently wrote a couple of articles about these decision making biases and how to overcome them. Biases also exist within businesses, based on leadership perspectives and company processes.

For example, at Origin, we acquire multi-family and office assets where we believe we can enhance value through capital improvements, cost-cutting and management change. But despite us following a very strict process to evaluate potential deals, we realized we’ve previously faced decision-making biases that influenced what assets we acquired. In this article, I’ll share how we modified our asset acquisition processes to overcome these biases.

Origin has acquisition officers who live and work in each of our four target regions to provide local knowledge and connectivity to off-market deals. Our acquisition officers and analysts first thoroughly evaluate a potential asset’s location, vintage, quality, demand drivers, supply threats, growth rates and expected priceto determine if the property will be a lucrative investment for Origin and our investors.

Most opportunities don’t make it through this initial screen. In fact, we typically review over 1,000 deals a year to acquire about six properties. An opportunity that passes this first step is then analyzed further through site visits and a competitive building analysis, using both external data and our own proprietary research. After this phase, our deal team presents a 10-15 page potential deal memorandum and financial analysis to the broader investment committee.

Origin also has an asset management team who will ultimately be responsible for executing on the asset’s business plan. It’s critical that our acquisition and asset management teams collaborate on the business plan and both sign off on the inputs used in the model.

For the past ten years, we have continuously honed the process of how a potential deal memorandum is evaluated at committee. Initially, we realized that my partner and I would frame the discussion by speaking before other team members. So we now make sure the broader team is able to showcase their expertise before my partner and I weigh in. We also found that it was best practice to get additional feedback privately, as some team members found they could be most honest when remaining anonymous. Further, we tied the compensation of all acquisition officers and asset managers to the overall performance of all deals to incentivize them to spend the necessary time to vet all deals and provide honest feedback.

In late 2017, Dave Welk, who leads our acquisition team, suggested that we create an objective model to price the risk of deals to further mitigate risk. The model would incorporate historical data on deal performance based on asset class, city, sub-market, idiosyncratic risk, building attributes and the structural risk of the deal. It took months to build the model and more time to evaluate the inputs and weights. We then tested the model on deals that we were in the process of underwriting, as well as the 30 deals that we had acquired over the past five years.

The results were extraordinary; the model accurately predicted the outcomes of our buildings and their business plans and, more importantly, would have prevented us from acquiring our two worst-performing assets! We were very surprised at this result, considering that we have such a talented team and thorough process for deal analysis.

In retrospect, I believe we didn’t recognize two inherent biases skewing our judgment:

1. Off-Market Deals Aren’t Necessarily Better than Marketed Deals

The first bias that affected our judgment was the perception that off-market deals will ultimately earn more money for our partners than marketed deals. We thought that since there were less participants bidding on the asset, that we were going to be able to secure the property at a lower price, eventually earning a higher return on the investment. It’s easy for an irrational mind to feel that an exclusive look at a deal is a better opportunity than a broadly marketed deal. However, we found this was not always the case and that all off-market deals must still undergo the same rigorous vetting as on-market deals.

Being aware of this bias in others, however, sometimes works to our advantage. We have sold some of our deals off-market because in certain instances buyers overpay for assets when they feel they have an exclusive opportunity, or they overprice the asset and do not have the broader market to help them realize their error. For example, we sold a Chicago West Loop multi-family asset in 2015 to an off-market buyer at a price we felt could not be attained through a marketed process. 24 months later, the buyer sold the asset at a 10% loss in a market that continued to strengthen.

2. Recapitalizations Don’t Guarantee Favorable Returns

The second bias that clouded our judgment was the perception that joint ventures guarantee favorable returns. In these instances, our deal team recapitalized the asset at a price lower than the asset would achieve if sold and negotiated favorable profit sharing and legal rights. However, we can’t let these advantages cloud our focus. Even when we negotiate the most favorable terms, our attention should remain on the total risk/return of the deal, because if profits are less than projected, investors will only receive a large percentage of a small pie.

Our risk model will continue to improve, as we test it with more and more deals that are underwritten and back-tested. This is not to say that we don’t value subjective discussion and the expertise of our team — that remains critical. However, our risk model will be used to evaluate every deal because it is able to objectively overcome our judgment-clouding biases.