Ignite Investments

Texas-based Ignite Investments (Ignite) is an independent capital-raising platform representing select sponsors. The company’s three-pronged strategy includes enhanced deal flow, superior client service, and optimized deal structuring. Ignite is dedicated to developing meaningful long-term relationships with investors, promoting transparency, and advocating alignment of interest between sponsors and investors. Ignite currently offers investment opportunities in private placements to accredited investors across several industries, including multifamily, mixed-use retail, hospitality, and restaurants.

A solid digital foundation and the right analytics can enhance informed decision-making and transform reporting. No one knows this better than Ignite Investments, a leading independent capital-raising platform based in Dallas, Texas. Yet, despite its rich history of creating wealth for investors, Ignite was still relying on Excel and other legacy systems to download data and analyze results in order to gain meaningful insights.

Azure Erickson, CAIA, Vice President of Investor Relations, says, “Our data compilation was in need of an overhaul. It was a time-consuming, error-prone process. It took days to produce reports that were light on useful analytics, cumbersome to present to the Board and other stakeholders, and inadequate at assessing the effectiveness of our fundraising and IR teams.”

A call from Juniper Square about participating in the beta program for its new Insights tool served as the catalyst for Ignite to think about how they could enable faster, more efficient data mining and seamless sharing of insights across the organization.

According to Erickson, “Following our conversion to Juniper Square, we were in desperate need of these reports because we had them in our old system and quickly found ourselves blind to analytics and data. We were thrilled when the Juniper Square team reached out about Insights.”

Nili Jaisinghani, Senior Managing Director at Ignite, echoed Erickson, “Our analytics wish list was long. We wanted to be able to integrate all of our data—sales, IR, investor, and fundraising—in one place so we could slice and dice it depending on the need or audience. In particular, we wanted to be able to use the data for strategic decision-making, better oversight of our sales and IR teams’ productivity, smarter and more visually appealing presentations to the Board, and to gain a better understanding of how our investors were interacting with and responding to our marketing so we could plan more successful re-engagement efforts going forward.”

Ignite is thrilled with the results. Erickson says, “Juniper Square Insights allows us to look at data in different ways so we can make strategic decisions about where to focus our time, determine forward-looking strategies, and better manage our fundraising efforts.”

“One of the reasons for the success was the ability of Juniper Square to quickly understand our needs and collaborate with us,” says Jaisinghani. “When we made suggestions, the Juniper Square team was eager to add features or implement enhancements that made Insights an even better tool. The level of thoughtfulness and care is incredible. It’s very rare to find an external partner who cares so much about an individual client’s needs and is willing to apply those specific needs to the broader project.”

Jaisinghani continued, “I think Insights is going to be a gamechanger in the CRE industry. It allows sponsors to really understand their businesses and make more strategic decisions moving forward. Many sponsors provide historical analysis, but the piece that we can’t do as efficiently is look at data in different ways. If we want to cut our data in five different ways in the future, we’re definitely not downloading it and looking at it in an Excel file.”

Insights is also helping to keep Ignite’s Sales and IR teams accountable. Erickson says, “We can quickly and easily collaborate in real time to stay informed and productive across investor accounts and new projects. We’ve been able to better delineate between what is a meaningful engagement versus one that should be relegated to an investor management side rather than a sales side.”

Going forward, Nili expects to use Insights to measure a salesperson’s ability and time to close. Jaisinghani says, “I want to know how many days an investor is in a particular category. If they are sitting in a category for more than a week, I want to be notified. Previously, I was unable to do that. Enabling Azure and me to identify stragglers will not only be helpful, it should improve our fundraising efforts—and all that information can now be easily produced in a report that we can share.”

Erickson continues, “We envision using data to not only manage sales, but set IR strategy to get more meaningful engagement with investors. For example, we’re now able to actively segment investors from least to most engaged, and determine which combination of activities will have the best chance of moving people along the engagement spectrum.”

With a fully digitized solution for analytics in place, Ignite is discovering new ways to do business more efficiently and make smarter, more actionable decisions. Erickson concludes, “Having a connected platform to run our analytics will allow for newfound agility and productivity.”

Metrics as of 12/31/2021