Deals and Investments within PropTech with Mike Sroka and John Fitzpatrick

On today’s episode we’ll be interviewing John Fitzpatrick otherwise known as Fitz, the managing director and global Chief Technology Officer of Blackstone Real Estate, and Mike Sroka the co-founder and CEO of Dealpath, the leading deal management platform for the real estate industry. We’ll explore how PropTech can enhance deal and investments with instead of real estate and we thought what better than to interview Mike and Fitz together?

I’ll give a brief introduction.  John is the managing director and global Chief Technology Officer of Blackstone real estate, the technology and innovations group. Now I’m sure everyone listening has heard of Blackstone but in the unlikely event you have not, Blackstone is one of the world’s leading investment firms with something like – this might not be entirely up to date – but its $564 billion worth of assets under management. Now, John is responsible for all aspects of technology across Blackstone real estate and their portfolio companies and also oversees the Blackstone innovation investment program which seeks to unlock value for Blackstone’s LPs, and the firm by taking stakes and targeted early stage technology based investment opportunities. Prior to this, John oversaw various initiatives across the entire technology and innovations group. Before joining Blackstone in 2011, John worked at Capital IQ for seven years where he was most recently, the Head of Product. He received a BS in finance from St. John’s University and currently serves on the Blackstone charitable foundations Leadership Council. And it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show John. And now for Mike, Mike is the founder of Dealpath. Now, Dealpath is the real estate industry’s leading cloud-based deal management platform. Investment and Development firms leverage Dealpath as their command centre for smart pipeline tracking, powerful deal analytics and collaborative workflows. Mike founded Dealpath in 2014 and since then, has supported over $5 trillion worth in transactions with leading institutions across the world which we will hear more about later on in the podcast. Now prior to Dealpath Mike spent over a decade growing venture backed software companies including Fanhood, One Season and  many more. He started his career at Hudson Advisor, which I’m sure a lot of you have heard of, as a managing agent for loan style funds. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BS in economics with finance applications. He’s also a member of Urban Land Institute, the ICSC and the Forbes Real Estate Council among others, and lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two kids. And so that was a brief sum up and but John and Mike without further ado, I love to hear how you first crossed paths. I didn’t know if Fitz you wanted to kick it kick start that?

John

Sure. And again, thank you for having me on the podcast today. So how did Mike and I first cross paths? Well, a couple of ways. Initially, Mike reached out to us as a lot of Prop tech vendors do, understanding the size and scale of Blackstone and how his product can be applicable to us. So initially we found it interesting, we have a strategy of Blackstone to try to digitise all of our processes and a tool like Dealpath was quite intriguing however, we had other initiatives at the time, concurrent there our portfolio companies, and our office platform started asking as well to use a tool like Dealpath to more effectively manage their deal flow because there was a general void in the industry. Typically how it would work was either have a homegrown solution, use a vendor product i.e. Salesforce or the like to track this and you’re just given some of the uniqueness of real estate, none of them were really able to fully solve those use cases. So as deal flow continued to rise, the necessity to communicate more effectively, to keep everybody in the loop so to speak, to tie to central systems, those platforms began to continually demand a tool like Dealpath and started using it. And then from the Blackstone perspective, we took notice in terms of the efficiencies that they were gaining by using this particular software, and really outside of maybe a tool like VTS a few years back, the overwhelming demand from our portfolio to use a tool that gained tremendous efficiency and really helped their workflow really caught our attention at the Blackstone level. And then we started digging into use it for our own use cases and use it as a connectivity point to our portfolio companies to drive further efficiency in some of the manual processes. So apologies for the long winded explanation but it certainly kind of came from multiple angles and  the demand from our business folks, so to speak, and their positive commentary in terms of the effectiveness of the software really kind of caused us to take a deeper dive on the software and basically bump it up the priority list.

Louisa

Yeah, well it’s fantastic, you’ve become both a client and strategic investor in Dealpath. Mike, from your side, tell us a little bit about little about how did Dealpath first begin? What’s the whole story behind it?

Mike

Yes, it’s been a long time in the making. We are very proud and excited today to be the number one deal management platform for Real Estate Investment Management. We started the company in early 2014 and long before that, I had started my career in real estate finance. And it was really former colleagues and friends that I would credit with being persistent in describing the challenges that they were having and requesting better tools that really led us to the opportunity. We officially started the company in March 2014 and have been methodically building out the platform since then. Maybe just kind of echoing Fitz, when we started Dealpath we viewed Blackstone as the largest, most sophisticated real estate investment manager in the world and kind of the aspirational client where we could have the biggest impact on investments in the built world. And over the past years, as Fitz has described, started meeting with Blackstone teams and started growing our product capabilities and our customer base, and have really built out quite a bit from where we started. And that being said, it’s still very early innings. So when I think of the path ahead, there is so much more work to be done. And we couldn’t be more excited for that.

Louisa

Yeah, Mike you definitely have some pretty impressive clients which a lot of Proptechs or general businesses dream of having, how have you have you gone about winning these clients?   Are there any obstacles that you faced when you first started?

Mike

It’s been step by step. And I don’t think that there’s been a silver bullet or a single moment, but I think just consistently working hard on listening to clients’ needs and building out our solutions for them and earning the business and trust of larger and larger clients. And today six and a half years after we started, we’ve made tremendous progress. We also feel like there’s so much more to do. So, I think we are really proud of the clients that we support today. And Fitz can describe how we’re working with his teams, but a big part of it, I think is really us listening closely to those clients and understanding their businesses and their needs. And as thoughtfully as we can prioritise in our product roadmap to build out solutions that will have the biggest positive impact on their businesses.

Louisa

Yeah, and you cover three main areas, from what I understand the client capital and the acquisition, development, and the financing of real estate property. Can you expand on any of these and talk us through how Dealpath can add value to various investment funds?

Mike

Yeah, so we are really focused, we are purpose built for Real Estate Investment Management. All of our clients are deploying capital in the acquisition, development, and financing of real estate assets and Dealpath is really the command centre for their front office to focus on value at work, to identify and mitigate risks and to deliver optimal risk adjusted returns. I always think of us as kind of like pipeline through portfolio management, and really managing that lifecycle of an asset. And we’ve got lots more work to do and the capabilities that we can support there but see this as such an important indeed, market and a big opportunity.

Louisa

And then John, as we’re talking about market opportunities, can you maybe share a little bit about   your own vision and the potential opportunities you see for Dealpath and the free 3, 5, 10 years ahead?

John

Sure. I’ll share a little bit, but I told Mike I won’t share too much! Everytime Michael gets the call from me about new enhancements it might seem bonkers a little bit, but I think a couple of things and maybe I’ll just a touch on a few points that Michael made as well, too. I mean, like given the current state that we’re in now globally, the kind of acceleration I think by the most sophisticated managers to digitisation of all these particular processes is just a huge tailwind for solutions, like Dealpath. And I think what you’re seeing broadly speaking in the PropTech space is kind of a fleshing out of like the true solutions versus the pretenders. And when you think of a solution, like Dealpath a couple of points that I’d like to comment on is that they’re a critical component of a larger technical ecosystem of most shops, right, whether it’s the pipeline management, the Capital Management, the disposition tracking things of that nature, they do that very well. However, for them to really work and why we were so excited about Dealpath is really the technical underpinning behind the solution to allow it to tie to other systems, whether it’s a property management system, a ledger system, evaluation system, and seamlessly, kind of tying these components together, I think it’s crucial for us because at the end of the day, how we think about it at Blackstone is investing is a game of connecting the dots and whoever can connect the dots and tell the best picture and have an information advantage typically wins and Dealpath it was really brought to Blackstone and our portfolio companies to connect some manual processes that we had to allow us to make more timely decisions, to track historical content, and to improve some of the workflow as it relates to going to deals. And so when we think about future enhancements to the Dealpath product, and probably one of the main premises of why we made the strategic investment helped direct the product team, they’re all kind of centred around that. And when you think of a deal management platform, and you look at the other providers in the space, it’s who really has the enterprise grade level, functionality and capability right? So when you so you take a quite sophisticated manager like ourselves and you think of things like, like MARR and be able to segment MARR or things of currency conversion for a multi-national global corporation like ourselves, that that’s where they really start to differentiate. And then again, the technical sophistication that we have at Blackstone where we want solutions that tie and talk to each other, and really kind of plug into an overall ecosystem into our larger data efforts is just crucial. And I think that’s where you’re going to see more in the future as relates to Dealpath in the sense of building better tools on top of their core, further integration points, and further integration points with  call it core systems and solutions that managers use. I’ll let Michael talk any further on the roadmap.

Mike

Yeah, I mean, I agree completely with what Fitz is describing is that we see this nice for a modern real estate tech stack, which is to be able to connect the tools and systems and people across an organisation to get the full value. And Dealpath was built from the ground up as an open system designed for inter-operability with those other tools and having a third party API and developer portal and supporting ETL, and having built in integrations are examples of some of the ways that we can facilitate that. But there’s still so much work to be done by Dealpath and by the industry to remove the friction of allowing the data of these firms to flow seamlessly to the different departments and personnel that need to have access to it. And so when we look ahead that is where a lot of our product roadmap is centred, is really deepening the workflows and integrations that that bring that balance to life and unlock that value.

Louisa

And looking at value since late 2014 when you launched, is there a particular success story? Or part of your product that you developed, which was almost like a game changer? Or something whether it’s a real estate investment that the industry seems to be demanding most? Anything that sticks out for you, Mike?

Mike

This is maybe less exciting, but it’s been this I think constant efforts to try to minimise variables and   solve for one thing at a time while keeping an eye on kind of the bigger solution and big picture. And when we first started the company and had very little product built out, we were I would say maniacally focused on a very small set of use cases and initially Dealpath was designed to support the acquisition of a single tenant net lease retail property. And as we built our confidence in our ability to support that, we expanded into doing multi-tenant retail and portfolios of retail and expand into other property types to do office and industrial and multifamily, and then not just the acquisition, but the ongoing development of projects and the financing of those acquisitions and developments and then starting to really focus on broadening to be able to connect and to support more portfolio management use cases. And when we look back, we’ve got this solution that we’re really excited about those capabilities. But it wasn’t necessarily one killer app, one special feature or one thing that that made it happen, I think that it’s been just the constant listening and focus and retooling and oh, by the way need to continue that that discipline because again, it’s early innings for the value that can be created here.

Louisa

Yes, it’s a lot of hard work, time and a good team to the supporting you, but also uptake in the industry as well. I feel like we’re definitely making movements but if we’re focusing on where we’re at in the industry, and uptake in technology or say digitalisation, John where do you see real estate on this path to digitalisation? You worked for Blackstone, do we have a long way to go? Are you seeing more uptake? And everyone’s saying COVID pushed it forward. Do you see that pattern?

John

Well, I think yeah, I think broadly speaking real estate in general as relates to technology is always a little bit behind some other financial asset classes, as relates to COVID I think certain real estate managers and participants in the industry given the force function that COVID has created have been way more amenable to trying and using new technologies either ”PropTechnologies” or tangential technologies to make themselves more efficient. And I think a lot of that is out of necessity, right, just given the current state we’re in. What I’m seeing from my vantage point, to the point I think you were making at the beginning of the question which relates to real estate technology, you’re really starting to see a little bit of a convergence from like the pretenders, to the real value add solutions, and I think to the point that Michael was making just before, it’s like just solving one little component isn’t going to do the trick. You have to really show the value you add to your solution because what I’ve seen with COVID and at certain shops where budgets are constricting is folks going back to the core real estate technology platforms. However, the PropTech companies and the ones that compliment those solutions or solve use cases that that those solutions don’t solve at all or don’t solve well are seeing a huge uptick in traction as well. And I think that’s really what’s going to define the industry on the forward right? Like there really is no great one size fits all solution to solve real estate. It’s a combination of a few solutions. And I think what I’m seeing both at the Blackstone level, but even more broadly across the industry is everybody’s looking for the best of breed in the four or five key areas right, as it relates to technical solutions to drive efficiency. Because these solutions do drive a tremendous amount of efficiency, they lower cost and they allow you to be more productive, and with the “digital transformation” of a lot of industries, real estate being one, I think the appetite and the desire to digitise more and be more effective with the tools that are available is just a huge tailwind for solutions like Dealpath on the forward.

Louisa

Looking to the outside of Dealpath, are there any areas of real estate where there’s a need of a product which may be Blackstone’s looking for? Or where do we need some development?

John

Yeah, I think there’s a lot I mean, look, we do at Blackstone have various committees where we’re looking at PropTech and looking at areas where we feel like technical solutions are underdeveloped or lacking right there. a few years back, we were looking at deal pipeline management, that’s how we identified a tool like the Dealpath. Right now, I’d say some areas, just to give you a couple are probably around leasing and virtual leasing, there’s some solutions there. But I think that’s an area where we’re excited to hopefully see some development with the PropTech companies on the forward. The other thing on the prop tech, I’d say we’re where we’re seeing a lot of pretty interesting developments is around security, whether it’s advances in camera systems and software that plugs into that, and things of that nature, it’s quite interesting. And then lastly, on the asset management side is definitely some interesting tools out there that are making asset managers, property managers more effective, and really kind of pushing some of the legacy way of thinking, which we think is quite interesting.

Louisa

And Mike, going back to what we were talking about before, to do with uptake in other businesses of your product, maybe taking a pilot on and then to using it, how have you found it? What are you   expecting in the next few years in this new norm for your business?

Mike

I would say that, from our perspective, and I think Fitz actually has the best pattern recognition here but what we’ve observed is that over the past four, five, six years there’s been a huge surge of investment and development in real estate software services. And some of those new tools and solutions are starting to get traction. However, we still haven’t hit kind of the full adoption wave. I think we saw last year, maybe the first tipping points where maybe we crossed the chasm from early adopters to early majority. But we still haven’t gone from early majority to mass market adoption of these new tools and solutions which are continuing to build out and mature. And that’s probably the single most important thing for everyone in the market, whether you’re a real estate operator or service provider, that is the big moments of value creation. That’s kind of the official digital transformation of real estate as the largest asset class in the world. Very exciting stuff that’s happening, and it’s something that we’re keen to position ourselves for the environment over the past five or six months, has changed a lot of people’s work and their priorities and in many ways, I think is actually a bit of a catalyst for this digital transformation of real estate and is putting a spotlight on pain points that people had before and now simply can’t work without new solutions. And so, we’re seeing kind of this acceleration in the adoption wave, and from Dealpath’s kind of focus, every portfolio manager in the world right now is trying to understand the impact and performance of their own portfolio. They’re trying to evaluate repositions or opportunistic investments. And that really aligns very closely with the services that we provide. Having centralised data that is globally accessible, has never been more important. Every investment committee is coming together remotely each week trying to understand how to make these investment decisions. Having standardised workflows that enable your team to work effectively from wherever they might be working is a requirements to get things done right now, and having really, really strong enterprise grade data security as all this proprietary information is being housed in these new cloud services also critical for the market. So while these are challenging times and changing quickly, I think that there are some positive aspects that that we see and wants to leverage fully. We see the future of real estate investment management as really being more programmatic portfolio management and transaction execution. But it’s going to take a lot of work to get there. The first steps are how do we organize and structure all of the data that these firms have, visualise it so they can be more data driven and their decision making and start automating the steps along the way. And that’s really what we’re marching towards, with the aim of the Dealpath being where the built world transacts and being that centre of real estate investment in capital markets in the age of intelligent software.

Louisa

Well, my next question is where do you see Dealpath over the next a few years, but you sort of answered that. There’s another question which I get asked a lot, so I help our companies launch in cities, so US – massive, and you have launched and started in San Francisco, you then also launched in New York, and a lot of people wondering and it’s a fairly big question, but how do the two markets compare? Is there a stark difference in uptake, or requirements of clients? How did you find the two launches?

Mike

I guess the way that we think about it is that real estate is a local business and institutional capital is global. And from the beginning of creating Dealpath, I think that an assumption of ours is that this is a global business of real estate investment management, and that we need to build out a solution that works well for that dynamic asset class. Today, we support hundreds of top firms across geographies. From a practical standpoint our initial go to market efforts have been in North America so the majority of our clients are headquartered in North America, we do have clients based in many other geographies and I think see huge need and opportunity to continue building out our go to market efforts and product capabilities to do a great job of solving for this global asset class.

Louisa

Yeah, I’m personally very excited to see what happens. I always ask the question the end of the show, where do you see PropTech in five years down the road, but I think no one knows at this point, but it sounds like Dealpath is doing a great job and I wish you the best. I’m excited to when we can all meet up whether it’s in Europe or back home in the States. We’re coming to the end of the show, but what I’d love to hear, so say Mike if you weren’t in PropTech, if you weren’t in software, is there any off the topic any career you would like to pursue or you might pursue in the future?

Mike

Something that we talk about as a team is that if it was the year 1800, and you weren’t in London, you weren’t in it. And if it was the year 1900, and you weren’t in New York City, you weren’t in it. And if it’s 2020, and you’re not in prop tech or real estate, software services, you’re not in it. So I can’t think of any place else that we’d want to be. This is this is where we want to be.

Louisa

Yeah. And Fitz, what about you?

John

Well, it’s funny, I always ask that question, that’s one of my most popular interview questions, I think it was even a question I asked of Michael when we had met early days, ‘if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now, what’s your dream job?’ So mine right there would be running a Formula One race team because I love the mixture of competition and technology. But I would say I would fully echo Mike’s points, I think the reason that we’re getting in these particular industries and doing what we’re doing, and just looking at my career previously a Capital IQ and how we wanted to digitise how investment banking worked. And I think we were relatively successful there. And now at Blackstone kind of taking a behemoth of an industry like real estate, and digitising that and using data to help make more better investments and more informed decisions, and arguably one of the largest financial asset classes. I think it’s just interesting, right? And to Michael’s point we’re still in the early innings as this goes and your earlier comments in terms of some of the PropTech companies are interesting, some are just kind of shots in the dark, and really be able to kind of wean through kind of the pretenders, first the real game changers and come up with solutions to really drive the industry. And when we look back in 5 years or 10 years and say, ‘Hey, listen we made these particular bets and we helped kind of change how the industry does business’, I think it’s a really, really rewarding position to be in from a career perspective, knowing that you are on the forefront of driving that.

Louisa

Yeah, well, let’s wait and see what happens the next 5-10 years. What Michael Beckman spoke about in his las four day conference about reimagining real estate, like no one has any idea what it’s going to be like, how buildings will operate into the 2 to 5 to 10 years’ time, which is really exciting. So   I completely agree. We’re all in the right place and here’s to more innovation. Now it’s unfortunately coming to the end of the show now before we go, Mike and John, if you can please share  with the audience any parting bit of information or advice, and also and let them know the best way to connect with you. Mike, would you like to go first?

Mike

Sure. I don’t know about the advice side. But I would say that if there’s interest in learning more about Dealpath, our www.dealpath.com has a lot of great content on it, and a number of ways to contact different parts of our organization. And we would love to hear from you and are excited about potential opportunities with new clients and new partners. So www.dealpath.com is the best place to reach us.

John

I guess from my side, for the fellow CTOs in the real estate sector or CEOs, when you’re looking at tools like Dealpath or even tangential tools, I think you need to do two things, two pieces of advice. One is to really have a wholesome vision for your overall technical ecosystem. So then when you’re looking at these particular tools, you’re thoughtful in terms of how you’re going to plug them all together and get the maximum value in terms of efficiency in terms of data capture etc and really think of it holistically don’t just jump into point solutions. And then two and will probably one of the things that attracted us to Dealpath the most and just from my vantage point where prop tech companies fail, and where they succeed is really looking for companies that have two components. One really good technology and this is your California to New York question, some have really good technology, but have a very limited understanding of real estate. And others have a really strong understanding of real estate and poor technology. So I think when you see these solutions that really have both of those, which are far and few to be totally honest with you, those are really the ones that are quite successful, because they’re truly solving a business problem, and doing it in a technical way that will allow them to scale for the future. And that was, again, something that heavily attracted us to Dealpath and some of the other investments that we’ve made to date and that’s probably the thing that I would just kind of tell everybody to look out for.

Louisa  

Sure. And then for people how can they connect with you Fitz, or Blackstone?

John  

Sure. I mean, feel free to   reach out to me either via email via LinkedIn, I’d be more than happy. To help answer questions it’s a small industry and I think everybody’s pretty cordial amongst themselves. So feel free if you have any questions I have no problem with anybody ever reaching out to me.