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:

1. Lease View opens instant access to data to more people in the organization to get a quick answer in an abstract or lease.
2. Intuitive nature of the platform and ability to search specific terms in an abstract.
3. Point and click functionality within the abstract itself to bring up a provision in the original document.
4. More efficient to keep abstracts up to date.
5. Flexibility of the web-based portal, instant reporting technology, and fluid exporting technology to Excel, Word, and HTML.