
Benefits
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01
Administration expertise
“Our prior third-party administrator didn’t quite grasp our business. Since we switched and partnered with Juniper Square as our fund administrator, that’s no longer the case. Juniper Square fully understands exactly what it is we do. They have a real understanding of our investors and the types of real estate we offer, so they know what we need, the services our investors expect, and how to get the job done quicker and more accurately.”
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02
Improved investor relationships
“One of the biggest challenges we experienced before Juniper Square was communicating with our investors in an effective and concise way. We weren’t able to tailor our communications or distribute them in an efficient way. Now that we have Juniper Square, we can flag investors and their trusted contacts for specific communications and attach documents that are securely housed in the portal. Having a user-friendly system that facilitates interactions has been a game changer. I can go into the investor’s view and walk them through the subscription process or show them a quarterly report so we’re able to have more productive conversations. I spend much less time being reactive and far more time interacting with investors in a meaningful way.”
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03
More time
“Juniper Square’s technology and administrative solutions free up time that we previously spent manually creating reports or inefficiently loading documents to a data warehouse. Now we spend our time traveling and meeting with investors, helping them understand their investments. It’s a much better use of our time than dealing with clunky technology.”
CUSTOMER OVERVIEW
Founded in 2001, Ohio-based CREC Real Estate, LLC (CREC) is an institutional-caliber real estate private equity investment management firm with more than $1.2 billion in assets under management.
CREC focuses on direct investment and joint ventures with best-in-class real estate operators and developers. They currently invest in value-add and core-plus multifamily acquisitions and select ground-up developments in supply constrained, high barrier-to-entry markets in secondary cities throughout the United States.
Since inception, CREC has completed 53 investments across 18 states.
CHALLENGE
CREC’s investor base has grown significantly over the past several years so they wanted a system that would ensure their reporting and communications were keeping up with the demands of the modern investor. They envisioned a portal that would replicate the traditional wealth management experience, where investors or their trusted partners could log in and easily access current investment offerings, all of their tax documents and investment performance and property reports—from any device and whenever they needed them. They also wanted tools that could increase collaboration between teams and improve their day-to-day operations.
The reality didn’t align with their vision. Mary Heidorn, Manager of Investor Relations at CREC explains, “We were trying to Frankenstein together a portal that was not meeting our needs or our investors’ expectations. Bulk communications were virtually impossible. One team was manually updating spreadsheets to populate reports while another team was assembling and checking every report before sending them to investors. We were attempting to send things from Outlook with a lot of blind carbon copies. Email addresses were being added manually. You couldn’t attach large documents. Nothing was tailored to the investor. It was a difficult, time-consuming process that was subject to human error. Everything was haphazard and not seamless at all.”
SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION
In the spring of 2018, CREC interviewed several software providers. A few offered to develop a custom solution. Others weren’t aligned with their business model. But CREC needed something that was already proven, fit their needs, and was ready to use immediately. “We have a unique business,” Heidorn explains. “We talked to companies that didn’t understand our business who were trying to reconfigure a solution to fit what we do. What we found with Juniper Square was that they already understood the real estate private equity business and their solutions already fit our needs. Plus, they were able to answer questions that we didn’t even know to ask.”
It was also important to CREC to get a solution that was ready to go out of the box and that could be private-labeled to meet their needs without requiring a tremendous amount of their resources. Seth says, “Our team here at CREC doesn’t have the expertise to help design an interface for our investors, so we needed a solution that would take minimal work to get up and running and offer best-in-class service for our investors.”
“We ultimately chose Juniper Square because of its CRM capability and the fact that we could see it being used across every department in our company,” Mary says. “But when we were talking to a competitor who was trying to build a system for us, we asked, ‘What are you trying to be?’ They answered Juniper Square. That conversation sealed the deal.”
CREC started the onboarding process and uploaded all of their historical information on the Juniper Square platform during the fall of 2018 and went live at the beginning of 2019. “We couldn’t be happier with our choice,” Mary says. “Juniper Square provides everything we need to communicate with investors, release new investment offerings, distribute documents, and create professional polished reports that are customized to our firm. Our investors are informed and happy, and our teams are able to do their jobs more effectively.”
Later, when it came time to search for a new administrator, the decision was easy. “The Juniper Square platform helped us accomplish everything we set out to do and more,” Seth says. “We will continue to add more features and get more entrenched with the Juniper Square platform by adding fund administration services and anything else Juniper Square will allow us to do.”