Parkview Financial

CUSTOMER OVERVIEW

Founded in 2009, Parkview Financial (Parkview) is a direct private lender specializing in ground-up commercial and residential real estate financing. Through a private real estate debt fund, they provide short-term bridge and construction loans secured by first trust deeds to developers throughout the United States.

Headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in New York, Denver, and Atlanta, Parkview has grown exponentially, earning a reputation as one of the most respected private construction lenders in the nation for their fast, creative financing and execution.

With more than 350 years of combined experience, Parkview’s team of in-house experts has weathered several real estate cycles and understands the entire development process.

Since launching, Parkview has successfully executed more than $3 billion in financing for multifamily, retail, office, industrial, and mixed-use projects with executed loans ranging from $5 million to $200 million.

Challenge

Prior to Juniper Square, almost everything at Parkview was done in either QuickBooks or Excel. As Austin Carlson, Managing Director, Head of Sales & Investor Relations, puts it, “It was a very dinosaur way to do it. Not only was it very manual, it opened us up to potential mistakes.”

Austin continues, “It was inefficient and, as we continued to grow, it was taking more time to complete our work—not only for sales and investor relations, but for our controller and our operations team, too. We needed a solution that would store all our investor and investment information in one secure location, so we no longer had to open five or six different Excel files to get to an answer. We also wanted a solution that would help us streamline our workflows, improve efficiency, minimize risks, and make sure that our reporting was complete, accurate, and timely.”

At the same time, Parkview realized they were outgrowing their administrator. Austin explains, “When I started at Parkview, a very small accounting firm was doing our fund administration. That worked initially, but we were growing in both the size and complexity of our offerings. When we launched an offshore fund with a blocker structure, it became clear that we needed to bring on a new administrator that would immediately establish a sense of trust with our investors and allow us to scale our operations.”

SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION

Austin explains that Parkview had several key criteria they were looking for in an administrator. “A key factor for us was definitely reputation. Flexibility, expertise, and ease of use were equally important. We wanted to make sure that the administrator understood our business and offered a user-friendly platform that made it easy for both the Parkview team and our investors to access information.”

To find an administrator, Parkview put out the feelers and interviewed seven firms. Austin says, “We wanted to get a better understanding of how each administrator was built, its size, its flexibility, and how it operated. We wanted an administrator that could adapt to our needs and grow with us as we launched new, more complex funds. But we also wanted an administrator that investors were going to trust from the get-go, just from hearing the firm name.”

Austin explains why credibility mattered so much. “We have sizable institutions and high net worth individuals allocating anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to millions of dollars in capital with us. They want to know that we’re working with a trusted third-party administrator that is looking over and monitoring every transaction. In fact, one of the most frequent questions we get is ‘who is your fund administrator?’ Having a fund administrator with a solid reputation definitely helps.”

Austin also stressed the importance of finding an administrator with good technology. He explains, “Once we started looking for a new administrator, we were surprised by the number that used out-of-date software that was difficult to maneuver. Ultimately, we needed an administrator that offered technology that was easy to implement, intuitive, user-friendly, and enhanced our reporting capabilities.”

Austin says Parkview also heard from investors that it was time to switch to a more institutional-quality administrator. “It was something that we already knew, but our investors’ opinions were definitely a bit of a catalyst, both to start the process and in who we ultimately chose. We let a few select investors know which administrators we were considering and they helped us narrow down the list.”

Austin explained why they ultimately chose Juniper Square. “At the time we were evaluating administrators, Juniper Square was still building out its administration platform. We liked that, quite frankly. Juniper Square was putting a lot of resources into building out that side of their business. They were bringing experts from larger, more established fund administration firms who had decades of experience in various disciplines and with different types of investment vehicles and structures. That expertise was important to us. At the same time, they were smaller, more nimble, and more investor focused. From very early on, we identified that they had a similar mindset, and we liked that alignment of interests.”