Foxfield LLC

Foxfield is a real estate investment and development company focused on industrial and residential markets. The firm was built after the merger of two operating companies: Novaya Real Estate Ventures, an investment firm founded in 2011, and Foxfield Industrial, a property investor, developer, and operator founded in 2015. Headquartered in Boston, with offices in Atlanta and Philadelphia, Foxfield actively sources opportunities across risk categories in commercial and residential asset classes in primary and emerging East Coast markets.

Historically, Foxfield offered investors one-off, value-add, and development deals. These single-deal structures allowed investors to participate selectively in short- to mid-term, event-driven projects. They created the Foxfield Open-End Fund to complement their value-add and development business and offer a long-term vehicle to their clients.

To deliver the right investment opportunities to LPs, Foxfield expanded their investment strategy with a new open-end fund, a longer-duration vehicle aimed at providing current cash return for investors. They knew it was critical to lay an institutional-grade foundation and that getting it right would bolster their credibility with larger investors. Like many GPs of their size, Foxfield was looking for a third-party administrator to help them meet institutional LPs' expectations yet remain flexible enough to handle all the challenges of working with retail investors.

Their first administrator, however, failed to build that foundation.

Shawn Hawthorne, a partner at Foxfield, admitted the team never used that administrator’s waterfall or distribution calculation tools because “Our math was different than theirs. We were running parallel Excel books on every deal.” Shawn and his colleague, Forrest Cobble, knew that even the difference of a few dollars could make or break Foxfield’s reputation with some of their high-net-worth LPs.

When confronted with the discrepancies, rather than dig into the system to uncover the root issue, the administrator would push back and say Foxfield was the one with the math mistake.

Shawn and Forrest just wanted one source of truth they could rely on. “If you can't trust your system to be that source, you're probably in the wrong system,” concluded Shawn. It seemed so simple to them both. “We strike a share price every quarter, and we wouldn’t know the share price when we sent distributions because two different teams were doing the work. Can we not solve for our NAV before we do distributions?” he asked.

And while some fund managers keep internal shadow books for additional oversight or to supplement the information provided by their fund administrator, Forrest knew that Foxfield needed an administrator whose system and processes could be replicated, scaled, and, above all, trusted.

Foxfield was comfortable working with multiple vendors and partners—but the issue was that none of the systems talked to each other. “We were trying to build an institutional-grade platform by adopting great technology, but we quickly realized that we needed to start consolidating solutions without compromising quality,” said Forrest. After a year of frustration from a disjointed ecosystem, Shawn and Forrest talked with multiple operators who recommended Juniper Square.

Foxfield was initially looking at Juniper Square’s CRM tool. However, once they realized the same technology powered the Juniper Square fund administration service, Shawn and Forrest concluded they could get the multiple solutions they needed, all powered by a single firm.

Finally, Foxfield can have their NAV struck correctly before sending distributions. With a technology-centric administrator, Foxfield can automate routine tasks—investor equity calculations, digital subscription documents, waterfall calculations and allocations to LPs, payments for each investor—to reduce risk and improve efficiency. Built-in approval steps allow them to review critical activity.

“We didn’t want to be 100% hands-off,” said Forrest. “We want to be integrated into the process.” Using the same tools in their day-to-day that Juniper Square uses to administer the fund helps Shawn and Forrest better understand what their administration team is doing.

In addition to comprehensive fund administration services, Juniper Square has helped Foxfield scale and streamline the subscription process, which is especially powerful for improving the experience of repeat investors. Instead of asking investors to manually complete new documents for every deal, Juniper Square automatically assembles the subscription documents, validates data capture, and captures e-signatures. “Those people used to hate completing subscription docs,” said Shawn. “We would get emails asking us to copy the last one they filled out, which we absolutely cannot do for compliance purposes. But we need to cater to the investor, and with Juniper Square, they can click through a checklist, select a legal entity, and their docs are 90% done. When the first deal went digital, we never looked back.”

Digitization with Juniper Square has also set Foxfield up for compliance success. Forrest added, “Rather than sifting through 10,000 PDFs to find and pull out the data to put into Excel, it'll be in the database already.” Foxfield knows that every new investor is compliant when their offer is accepted. “We know we have an ironclad and repeatable process.”

“It's always a good idea to leverage technology made for your specific needs rather than relying on antiquated systems, which I think many real estate firms do. Whether it’s Excel or just back-the-envelope math—that's not repeatable. Why set the whole thing up again every quarter when you do your calculations?” concluded Forrest.