Customer Benefits
Cut to the chase
-
DVO can deliver timely and accurate fund financials while mitigating risk thanks to Juniper Square’s built-in approval workflows and audit logs.
-
The Juniper Square team ensures DVO’s investor ledger is kept current for both internal stakeholders and LPs.
-
The internal DVO team is more effective and impactful now that Juniper Square manages and automates notices for capital calls, contributions, and distributions.
-
multifamily units
10,000+
-
of assets acquired
$2B
-
years of combined investing experience
100+
The Client: Meet DVO Real Estate
Founded in 2012, DVO Real Estate (DVO) is a privately owned real estate investment management firm focused exclusively on providing structured majority and co-investment equity capital for value-add and ground-up multifamily assets in top-tier markets across the United States. DVO follows a fundamental investment philosophy of maximizing returns through value creation with a focus on capital preservation and consistent cash flow. Bringing to bear its expertise and long-standing relationships, the company has grown significantly over the past decade. To date, DVO has invested in 50+ assets comprising more than 10,000 multifamily units with an aggregate value of $2+ billion.
The Challenge: DVO’s previous fund administrator was negatively impacting the LP experience
As DVO grew, Founder & President, David Valger decided to outsource the firm’s fund administration work to a leading third-party provider. In addition to saving his in-house team time and making them more effective, he knew that working with a reputable fund administrator would be critical to attracting the institutional investors the firm wanted to work with.
That fund administrator, however, failed to meet DVO’s expectations. The administrator had posted documents to the wrong investor portals more than once, sending the DVO team scrambling to correct the issue.
While she was confident that working with a third-party administrator was a step in the right direction in the long term, Victoria Goldenberg, Assistant Vice President, Administration & Investor Relations, was frustrated that DVO couldn’t trust their administrator. Her team was forced to manually double-check all postings to ensure the right information went to the right LP. “It started to feel like we were moving backward rather than forward. We were doing a lot of the work again ourselves, except this time, we were paying another team that should have been eliminating the need for that.”
“Everything was still manual,” added David Chimon, Vice President, Finance and Accounting. “All the distribution schedules, all of the capital statements—every quarter, we were updating these schedules manually, which meant three or four versions could get saved, and things would become inconsistent. It wasn't real-time.”
Victoria also struggled with not getting reliable answers about capital calls. And with the fund administrator’s service team primarily based overseas—DVO is headquartered in New York—there were only a few hours each day when DVO could communicate directly with them. “While the accounting team was good, their investor services team continually fell short. We felt that long-term, it could affect our investor relationships,” Victoria concluded.
Victoria worried that mistakes made by their fund administrator would ultimately undermine DVO’s relationship with LPs. “Our investors need to be able to trust that the information we're providing them is accurate. With our last fund administrator, we were concerned about inaccurate info, incoming capital calls not being accounted for on their tracking schedules, or statements going to incorrect portals. We didn't want our reputation negatively affected by our fund administrator.”
The Switch: What DVO gained by working with Juniper Square
Given their desire to attract more institutional investors, David knew DVO needed a fund administrator with much better data governance to manage the increased due diligence, compliance requirements, and financial reporting. With their previous administrator, David and his team often scrambled to find the information, but “since we've switched to Juniper Square, the data is just more accessible, more organized, and it's easier to provide our investors with what they need.”
Thanks to a series of pre-built workflows and approvals, Victoria and her team can now easily review investor statements and work with their Juniper Square team to make necessary adjustments. “We are no longer creating all of the statements ourselves, renaming them all, and posting them all individually. It only takes one click, and I know they are going to the right investor portal.”
Knowing that institutional investors expect a best-in-class investor experience and easy access to their investment data, Juniper Square’s modern investor portal made it easier for DVO to package and present that data to LPs. Before Juniper Square, David remembered digging through PDFs and matching them with an Excel report to ensure he had the most up-to-date information. “We just didn't have confidence that everything was 100% accurate. Now, when someone in IR asks, Can you please send me the contributions and commitments for all of John Smith’s investments? With Juniper Square, all we have to do is search for that investor's name. There’s a prepopulated report ready to print out in a format that's impressive to them.”
Our partnership with Juniper Square feels safe and reliable. They are dedicated to ensuring all our reporting is accurately reflected, and I love having a team of dedicated professionals assigned to our account. Someone is always available to answer questions via email or hop on the phone.
Victoria Goldenberg
Assistant Vice President, Administration & Investor Relations
DVO Real Estate
Victoria added that working with Juniper Square made it even easier for DVO teams to collaborate and cut down on the internal back-and-forth. “Everything on the admin side is now easily shared with everyone on the investor-facing side. I used to get questions daily. But as David said, he can just pop in whenever he needs, and the information is right at his fingertips.”
“Keeping your investors happy is the number one priority,” concluded David. “It helps us get new investors in the future and gets our current LPs to reinvest. Financial reporting and accounting are the backbones of a prestigious private equity firm, but you need to have all those other systems in order. Juniper Square offers all of those things, and I think that's hard to find.”
Moving Forward: A trusted partner for all service providers
In addition to a better LP experience and increasing internal efficiency, working with Juniper Square has helped DVO coordinate more seamlessly with other service providers during the hectic tax season. With all LP contributions and distributions maintained in the Juniper Square system, in just a few easy clicks, David and his team can download structured records of the investor ledger for auditors and tax advisors.
“There's less scrambling to find items,” said David. “Because the Juniper Square process is better, it's saved us money. Less time needs to be spent hunting down the right data for our other third-party service providers.”
