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Assaf Morag2022-09-28 08:02:322022-10-10 10:54:50DealSumm releases Critical Dates Dashboard. Never miss a deadline again.Hartman Simons & Wood LLP
Hartman Simons & Wood LLP (HSW) is a leading commercial real estate transactional law firm based in Atlanta, with a significant national presence in retail, industrial, and office.
Situation and Objective
Before DealSumm, HSW had a team of three that would manually abstract leases for clients. This process utilized a significant portion of their time each day and quickly became a daunting task.
On top of the hours it took to prepare a complex lease abstract, the manual abstraction process resulted in hundreds of unlinked PDFs. Every time a client needed information, they had to go through a pile of abstracts and had no way to compile the data.
Exasperated with the lack of efficiency for client and in-house teams. They searched for a linked and integrated way to provide a much better product. Bob Simons, a founding partner, repeatedly asked HSW’s IT department for a solution, insisting there’s got to be a better way.
Solution
Serendipitously, Bob Simons ran into Robert Hultslander, a longstanding industry friend and DealSumm’s North American VP of Sales, at a party. While talking shop, Bob shared his frustration regarding manual abstraction, reporting, and the need for a more efficient approach, and Robert exclaimed: “that’s exactly what we’re doing!”
After further discussions, HSW decided to partner with DealSumm and started with full-service LeaseView abstraction and double human review – to save time in-house – and worked with DealSumm to tailor and refine the platform to HSW’s needs.
Outcome and Benefits
HSW found DealSumm’s team is attentive, cooperative, and willing to listen to its needs.
Delighted with the results, HSW became a long-term client. And, with many clients loving the delivered abstracts and reporting capability, some went on to become independent DealSumm clients.
HSW leverages DealSumm internally and also hosts the DealSumm platform for clients, including landlords, developers, owners, and investors who enjoy myriad benefits:
- Clients love the ability to sit at a terminal or iPad and be able to call up all the leases across their portfolio and have the data instantly at their fingertips.
- HSW’s paralegals love it as they can instantly find all addresses and information in one report, making it easy to issue estoppel letters and notices to all tenants when selling a shopping center or office building.
- All users find it user friendly from a reporting and editing standpoint.
Now, HSW uses DealSumm’s DIY LeaseExpress: “What would have previously taken 20 hours, and resulted in a 20-30 page lease abstract, now takes 1.5 hours to produce an abstract we’re confident sharing with clients. That’s less than 1/10th the time, and more than 90% savings,” relates Simons.
“When COVID hit, a national retailer client of ours wanted to look at all their leases for force majeure provisions. We suggested DealSumm, but they chose to abstract the provisions manually. We utilized a team of 15 people to go through these provisions at a significant expense. If they had used DealSumm, it would have saved them six figures and substantial time.”
– Bob Simons, Founding Partner
Westwood Financial
Westwood Financial (WF) is an owner and operator of an extensive portfolio of grocery-anchored shopping centers located in major metropolitan markets across the US. The firm’s mission is to provide investors and partners with stable, income-producing real estate investments.
Situation and Objective
As WF grew its portfolio and managed assets, the firm acquired thousands of leases with national tenants as well as family-owned businesses. The quantity and complexity of the documents involved in due diligence for the syndication of large deals created a challenge in harnessing and gaining visibility into lease provisions.
While WF’s ERP system stores the data and serves well for accounting and billing purposes, it wasn’t easy to get lease information in a way that was actionable for monitoring, decision-making, negotiation, and due diligence in acquisition and exit transactions.
WF wanted a global view of the portfolio to improve awareness of exposure regarding co-tenancy, termination rights, and other critical lease provisions. Drawing data from the existing ERP resulted in inefficiently generated lease abstracts. WF needed a lease data analysis and management partner that could work in unison with their ERP to provide stakeholders with enhanced access to actionable data.
Solution
A tradeshow meeting between the CEOs of WF and DealSumm led to a test of DealSumm’s lease abstraction and reporting platform. The successful pilot impressed WF with the innovative technology, and the firm decided to abstract their vast portfolio of leases. WF chose the full-service abstraction process, wherein DealSumm provided the AI-driven automated lease abstraction and human data validation.
Outcome and Benefits
The initial abstraction process was so successful that WF continues to utilize DealSumm’s LeaseView and LeaseExpress service to keep its lease database and abstracts instantly accessible and up to date with the multitude of renewals, amendments, and new transactions that emerge each year.
WF’s internal lease administration staff takes an active role in maintaining the platform by addressing these changes as they happen. The firm also utilized DealSumm to drastically streamline a portfolio-wide lease audit by conveniently cross-checking with its ERP without the aid or expense of specialized legal professionals.
Seeking the same synergies for their loan and financial documents, WF collaborated with DealSumm in the creation of custom templates for loan document abstraction. Now they use LoanSight to monitor and pull portfolio loan information as it relates to debt covenants and loan maturities.
WF lauds the best-in-class benefits:
- Lease View opens instant access to data to more people in the organization to get a quick answer in an abstract or lease.
- Intuitive nature of the platform and ability to search specific terms in an abstract.
- Point and click functionality within the abstract itself to bring up a provision in the original document.
- More efficient to keep abstracts up to date.
- Flexibility of the web-based portal, instant reporting technology, and fluid exporting technology to Excel, Word, and HTML.
“I was emailing with a colleague who was simply trying to get original documents off the ERP – the accounting system. He was working on a deal and wanted to send some leases as part of due diligence. It was painstaking in ERP needing to repeatedly ‘click and download.’ With DealSumm, if there are 18 documents associated with one file, you can easily dump it into a zip file. You only have to click on 1 thing, rather than 18.”
– Brett Johnston, VP of Operations
Saglo Development Corporation
Saglo Development Corporation is a Miami-based privately-held commercial real estate development firm that specializes in the acquisition, renovation, and active management of prime neighborhood and community shopping centers.
Situation and Objective
Before DealSumm, the leadership and management teams at Saglo did everything manually, and it involved endless self-prepared Excel spreadsheets.
While the Saglo teams were effective, they longed for greater efficiency in managing leases, and more visibility and accessibility to portfolio-wide (and property and tenant-specific) data to make the fastest and most informed decisions.
Solution
Saglo initially leveraged the full-service LeaseView to abstract and manage their entire portfolio of leases.
The Saglo team implemented DealSumm to facilitate due diligence, leasing, and operations. On the lease side, the firm uses DealSumm to analyze and report on rent increases, option terms, exclusivity clauses, and restrictions. And for operations, they monitor provisions, including common area maintenance (CAM) to ensure accurate invoicing.
Outcome and Benefits
After trying the DealSumm platform, the execs and management team at Saglo loved it and now use it every day as an integral part of operations.
Saglo’s CEO and VP use DealSumm for decision making and strategic planning for due diligence in transactions, while operations managers, property managers, and agents run reports for streamlined decisions in the field.
Today, Saglo utilizes the DIY LeaseExpress to handle new amendments and transactions to keep the library of leases and abstracts up-to-date.
The entire Saglo team uses the cloud-based platform, including leasing teams, managers, and accountants – all finding value in DealSumm’s diverse functionality and benefits:
- Intuitive searchability and power to see all leases at once.
- Click on the abstract and see all the critical deal terms of each lease.
- Instantly reference the original document to confirm provisions.
- Efficient drag-and-drop import, with fast notification of processing.
- One-step upload and all the abstracts are updated and current.
- Simplicity of editing and the ability to customize as you see fit.
- Keeps all team members on the same page – nobody misses or forgets anything.
“DealSumm’s technology saves a lot of hours in the day to focus on other things. We drag-and-drop, and abstraction and indexing is done automatically. It saves hours each week, and makes it simple to search provisions, especially restriction clauses for each tenant. We also appreciate the excellent response time – typically 24 hours or less.”
– Carlos Guzman, Vice President
CLS Holdings PLC
CLS Holdings plc (“CLS”) is a commercial property investment company with a £2.4B portfolio. The total portfolio encompasses 6.3m sq ft and is mainly comprised of future-focused office workspace across the UK, Germany and France.
With over 780 tenants, CLS delivers consistent, long-term value and steady growth by investing in modern office space in secondary locations. The company’s success is based on a proactive property management approach and a deep understanding of its tenants’ business ambitions.
Business Challenges
CLS considers lease documentation to be amongst the most important information to run its business operations. Unfortunately, there was no single repository for these key documents and finding information was often time consuming and difficult. It was even harder if the leases had been varied over time.
In many cases, only highly skilled legal staff were able to fulfil data requests from other staff such as Asset Managers and Property Managers. This resulted in information and decision-making delays.
CLS faced several data quality challenges during the delivery of a large digital transformation programme. Migrating data from legacy systems to a new property and finance system (MRI X) created testing problems related to verifying the accuracy of key operational information over a dataset. Much of this data originated from lease documentation.
DealSumm Benefits
Processing CLSs leases into the DealSumm platform provided the following business benefits:
- A company-wide single source of truth for lease data in the same format
- All lease information (including non-commercial information) is easily accessible to anyone in the company, including Asset Managers, Property Managers, and the Finance and Legal Teams
- One system that supports lease abstracts in the company’s three operational languages (English, French, and German)
- Searching is enabled across the entire repository of leases
- Facilitates faster decision-making
- Quick and easily configurable management reports based on lease information
- The ability to integrate lease data with other systems and compare/verify the data against other systems
- A system that is constantly updated with lease amendments making sure that users get the latest information reliably
“DealSumm provides a platform that enables us to have one single source of truth and align lease data with our other systems of record.”
– Greg Snow, Head of IT
“Dealsumm has provided the company with a system that holds all our lease documentation in one place in a searchable format. This has considerably reduced the time that it takes to find lease information, particularly in older documents, and enabled other users to access information that they need without needing to request it from the legal department. The format of the system allows users to view abstracted information alongside the original document which provides users with the security of being able to look at and move around in the document without relying solely on the abstracted data. Dealsumm is also extremely efficient at processing new lease information which means that the most up-to-date information is quickly available to all users.”
– Karen Soan, Senior Solicitor
Westwood Financial
Westwood Financial (WF) is an owner and operator of an extensive portfolio of grocery-anchored shopping centers located in major metropolitan markets across the US. The firm’s mission is to provide investors and partners with stable, income-producing real estate investments.
Situation and Objective
As WF grew its portfolio and managed assets, the firm acquired thousands of leases with national tenants as well as family-owned businesses. The quantity and complexity of the documents involved in due diligence for the syndication of large deals created a challenge in harnessing and gaining visibility into lease provisions.
While WF’s ERP system stores the data and serves well for accounting and billing purposes, it wasn’t easy to get lease information in a way that was actionable for monitoring, decision-making, negotiation, and due diligence in acquisition and exit transactions.
WF wanted a global view of the portfolio to improve awareness of exposure regarding co-tenancy, termination rights, and other critical lease provisions. Drawing data from the existing ERP resulted in inefficiently generated lease abstracts. WF needed a lease data analysis and management partner that could work in unison with their ERP to provide stakeholders with enhanced access to actionable data.
Solution
A tradeshow meeting between the CEOs of WF and DealSumm led to a test of DealSumm’s lease abstraction and reporting platform. The successful pilot impressed WF with the innovative technology, and the firm decided to abstract their vast portfolio of leases. WF chose the full-service abstraction process, wherein DealSumm provided the AI-driven automated lease abstraction and human data validation.
Outcome and Benefits
The initial abstraction process was so successful that WF continues to utilize DealSumm’s LeaseView and LeaseExpress service to keep its lease database and abstracts instantly accessible and up to date with the multitude of renewals, amendments, and new transactions that emerge each year.
WF’s internal lease administration staff takes an active role in maintaining the platform by addressing these changes as they happen. The firm also utilized DealSumm to drastically streamline a portfolio-wide lease audit by conveniently cross-checking with its ERP without the aid or expense of specialized legal professionals.
Seeking the same synergies for their loan and financial documents, WF collaborated with DealSumm in the creation of custom templates for loan document abstraction. Now they use LeaseView to monitor and pull portfolio loan information as it relates to debt covenants and loan maturities.
“Appreciative of the quality of the abstraction process, we decided to abstract and manage our loans as well. DealSumm is very responsive, knowledgeable, and professional,” says Brett Johnston, VP of Operations.
WF lauds the best-in-class benefits:
- Lease View opens instant access to data to more people in the organization to get a quick answer in an abstract or lease.
- Intuitive nature of the platform and ability to search specific terms in an abstract.
- Point and click functionality within the abstract itself to bring up a provision in the original document.
- More efficient to keep abstracts up to date.
- Flexibility of the web-based portal, instant reporting technology, and fluid exporting technology to Excel, Word, and HTML.
“DealSumm saves a lot of time in our organization. The AI does the heavy lifting, and then our staff only needs to verify. The platform is more efficient for the volume of documents, which would otherwise require skilled legal pros and hundreds of thousands of dollars. In tandem with our ERP, DealSumm enables us to have better record-keeping and highly-actionable intelligence,” concludes Johnston.
“I was emailing with a colleague who was simply trying to get original documents off the ERP – the accounting system. He was working on a deal and wanted to send some leases as part of due diligence. It was painstaking in ERP needing to repeatedly ‘click and download.’ With DealSumm, if there are 18 documents associated with one file, you can easily dump it into a zip file. You only have to click on 1 thing, rather than 18.”
– Brett Johnston, VP of Operations
Hartman Simons & Wood LLP
Hartman Simons & Wood LLP (HSW) is a leading commercial real estate transactional law firm based in Atlanta, with a significant national presence in retail, industrial, and office.
Situation and Objective
Before DealSumm, HSW abstracted leases manually for clients – and did a great job with a team of three. However, they were utilizing a significant share of their time each day and were frustrated that it took so long to prepare a complex lease abstract.
HSW also was looking for a way to provide a better product to clients. The manual abstraction process resulted in hundreds of unlinked PDFs. Every time a client needed information, they had to go through a pile of abstracts and had no way to compile the data.
Exasperated with the lack of efficiency for client and in-house teams. They searched for a linked and integrated way to provide a much better product. Bob Simons, a founding partner, repeatedly asked HSW’s IT department for a solution, insisting there’s got to be a better way.
Solution
Serendipitously, Bob Simons ran into Robert Hultslander, a longstanding industry friend and DealSumm’s North American VP of Sales, at a party. While talking shop, Bob shared his frustration regarding manual abstraction, reporting, and the need for a more efficient approach, and Robert exclaimed: “that’s exactly what we’re doing!”
After further discussions, HSW decided to partner with DealSumm and started with full-service LeaseView abstraction and double human review – to save time in-house – and worked with DealSumm to tailor and refine the platform to HSW’s needs.
Outcome and Benefits
HSW found DealSumm’s team is attentive, cooperative, and willing to listen to its needs.
Delighted with the results, HSW became a long-term client. And, with many clients loving the delivered abstracts and reporting capability, some went on to become independent DealSumm clients.
HSW leverages DealSumm internally and also hosts the DealSumm platform for clients, including landlords, developers, owners, and investors who enjoy myriad benefits:
- Clients love the ability to sit at a terminal or iPad and be able to call up all the leases across their portfolio and have the data instantly at their fingertips.
- HSW’s paralegals love it as they can instantly find all addresses and information in one report, making it easy to issue estoppel letters and notices to all tenants when selling a shopping center or office building.
- All users find it user friendly from a reporting and editing standpoint.
Now, HSW uses DealSumm’s DIY LeaseExpress: “What would have previously taken 20 hours, and resulted in a 20-30 page lease abstract, now takes 1.5 hours to produce an abstract we’re confident sharing with clients. That’s less than 1/10th the time, and more than 90% savings,” relates Simons.
“When COVID hit, a national retailer client of ours wanted to look at all their leases for force majeure provisions. We suggested DealSumm, but they chose to abstract the provisions manually. We utilized a team of 15 people to go through these provisions at a significant expense. If they had used DealSumm, it would have saved them six figures and substantial time.”
– Bob Simons, Founding Partner
Saglo Development Corporation
Saglo Development Corporation is a Miami-based privately-held commercial real estate development firm that specializes in the acquisition, renovation, and active management of prime neighborhood and community shopping centers.
Situation and Objective
Before DealSumm, the leadership and management teams at Saglo did everything manually, and it involved endless self-prepared Excel spreadsheets.
While the Saglo teams were effective, they longed for greater efficiency in managing leases, and more visibility and accessibility to portfolio-wide (and property and tenant-specific) data to make the fastest and most informed decisions.
Solution
Saglo initially leveraged the full-service LeaseView to abstract and manage their entire portfolio of leases.
The Saglo team implemented DealSumm to facilitate due diligence, leasing, and operations. On the lease side, the firm uses DealSumm to analyze and report on rent increases, option terms, exclusivity clauses, and restrictions. And for operations, they monitor provisions, including common area maintenance (CAM) to ensure accurate invoicing.
Outcome and Benefits
After trying the DealSumm platform, the execs and management team at Saglo loved it and now use it every day as an integral part of operations.
Saglo’s CEO and VP use DealSumm for decision making and strategic planning for due diligence in transactions, while operations managers, property managers, and agents run reports for streamlined decisions in the field.
Today, Saglo utilizes the DIY LeaseExpress to handle new amendments and transactions to keep the library of leases and abstracts up-to-date.
The entire Saglo team uses the cloud-based platform, including leasing teams, managers, and accountants – all finding value in DealSumm’s diverse functionality and benefits:
- Intuitive searchability and power to see all leases at once.
- Click on the abstract and see all the critical deal terms of each lease.
- Instantly reference the original document to confirm provisions.
- Efficient drag-and-drop import, with fast notification of processing.
- One-step upload and all the abstracts are updated and current.
- Simplicity of editing and the ability to customize as you see fit.
- Keeps all team members on the same page – nobody misses or forgets anything.
“DealSumm’s technology saves a lot of hours in the day to focus on other things. We drag-and-drop, and abstraction and indexing is done automatically. It saves hours each week, and makes it simple to search provisions, especially restriction clauses for each tenant. We also appreciate the excellent response time – typically 24 hours or less.”
– Carlos Guzman, Vice President
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Assaf Morag2022-09-28 08:02:322022-10-10 10:54:50DealSumm releases Critical Dates Dashboard. Never miss a deadline again.
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Assaf Morag2022-06-13 11:09:312022-06-13 11:11:23DealSumm releases Reports Pro, a new and enhanced reporting tool for commercial real estate documents.
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Assaf Morag2022-05-06 01:18:572022-06-09 12:58:26Avison Young partners with DealSumm
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Assaf Morag2022-04-05 09:10:142022-06-09 13:27:08Transform your #CRE contract data and minimize risk.
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Assaf Morag2022-03-03 01:29:462022-05-06 05:44:49DealSumm brings integration to third party data sources with Release of new REST API
