What Makes One Business Better than the Other?

In a competitive market businesses compete for the same crumbs; lowering pricing, and racing to chase customers, or in our case find and close deals. Competitiveness creates more work, more friction and makes us transaction driven rather than being driven to offer a service or product that has a wider purpose than just keeping the lights on and paying bonuses.

Real estate investment, both equity and credit as a business is competitive. The talent pool is roughly the same, the analytic metrics we all use are roughly the same, the pools of capital used for funding deals are roughly the same, and by and large, the returns are... as you've guessed it - roughly the same. Add on top of that that everyone seems to be copying everyone else. As an industry, real estate is still very analogue with very little vertical growth. The apparent result is that over the years we have seen traditional fees get thinner, and operating margins smaller as costs have increased to maintain and hire more of the same talent. So what makes one PE RE firm different than the next?

To answer this question, I like to compare business with sports.

Why do top players seem to always anticipate, and position themselves exactly where they need to be and other players always seem late. On one level they are all physically the same, yet there are always those exceptions. I think the answer lies in the algorithm they have computed in their heads and muscle memory accumulated over the years of practice and game time. They make the plays, they don't wait for the plays. If you make the play, people react, if you wait for the play, you are late and are reacting. If real estate lending is the playing field, and we are all players then to be a market leading lender we need to be thinking about making the play and not waiting.

At Hilltop Credit Partners, a London-based real estate credit investment manager that specialises in end-to-end funding for small and mid-sized residential property developers across the UK, we have been thinking a lot about what we do and how we do it. With experience in real estate development, asset management and we clearly understand what most GPs and borrowers need and want.

Last month we announced the launch of an innovative real estate credit acquisition platform called Credit Stream – a cloud-based borrower onboarding and portfolio management software application. This is the first of three technology improvements to help us identify and underwrite deals better and faster.

The first phase of this pioneering platform is designed to help borrowers access capital efficiently, and at scale, allow cross collaboration between internal and external teams and provide direct dialogue throughout the whole process. Built with efficiency as a core objective, the platform was designed and engineered by experts in technology, real estate, private equity, and credit.

Credit Stream allows developers to access funds up to 3x faster than the traditional process and control the timeline.?Blending technology with clear communication and collaboration, the platform allows us to fully onboard borrowers, manage the underwriting process and monitor development updates, project monitoring and spending in real-time. Borrowers can allow collaborators to have access to share portfolio deals, and repeat borrowers can get funded in under 4 weeks by using the platform for multiple real time projects.

?The platform has been developed following the appointment of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Justin Galvin.?Bringing a wealth of experience, Galvin began his career in New York City creating the award-winning software development company WDDG, and has since worked for leading companies such as The NFL, MTV, Oppenheimer Funds, CottonCo and Publicis group.

The platform has been built for the entire team from lawyers to brokers, executives to underwriters.

Hilltop Credit Partners is a partnership with Round Hill Capital, a leading global specialist real estate investor, developer and manager, specialising in innovative accommodation solutions across Europe and the USA.

For more information or to request a demo visit: www.hilltopcreditpartners.com