Customer Benefits
Cut to the chase
-
“We take our investor reporting incredibly seriously. We’ve built out a very high-quality organization. So, it matters to us that we get everything right. Juniper Square helps us ensure accuracy.”
-
“Juniper Square works well in enabling interaction between teams. Cross-functional collaboration is made smoother due to everything being on a single, web-based platform that everyone can access at the same time.”
-
“Juniper Square makes us more efficient by avoiding errors and some of the time-consuming nature of checking things for errors. This gives us the ability to focus on higher-value tasks.”
-
Properties acquired or developed since 1978
505
-
Value of acquired or developed property since 1978
$124B+
-
Property managed (sq ft)
218M+
Customer Overview
Tishman Speyer is a leading owner, developer, operator, and fund manager of first-class real estate worldwide. Founded in 1978, Tishman Speyer has acquired, developed, and operated 463 assets totaling over 213 million square feet, assembling a portfolio of more than $115 billion in total value across the United States, Europe, Latin America, India, and China.
They have major projects in various predevelopment and development phases in Austin, Boston, Beijing, Chicago, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, San Diego, San Francisco, São Paulo, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Washington, D.C. The firm also operates portfolios of prominent office properties in Berlin, Chicago, and London.
“We are not a simple shop. We’re global and have a very specific and complex set of investment partnerships. The way we fund our real estate holdings is quite complex, even relative to other large real estate owners. Many of our deals have 40 years of operating history,” said Joe Doran, Tishman Speyer’s Chief Financial Officer.
The Challenge
Before moving to Juniper Square, Tishman Speyer relied on a custom-built solution for investment management operations they had created in-house. Their internal portal was built on existing products such as Microsoft SharePoint, and their investor CRM was created more than ten years ago. While they continued to invest in development, the market had evolved past what they were using. Overall, the solutions lacked the sophistication they needed.
“One of my goals overseeing IT is to get out of the custom software development business. Real estate owners are not the best software developers,” Doran told us.
Doran and his team wanted their technology to enable the quality of experience that an investor would expect from Tishman Speyer. It needed to be current, look right, have the right feel, and be adaptable.
The Process
In their evaluation, the Tishman Speyer team knew it was important to find a solution that catered to the unique aspects of commercial real estate investing. “We feel that real estate is an odd duck in some ways, and it doesn’t always lend itself well to a product that was created for other purposes.”
After reviewing what Juniper Square could provide, they decided it was the platform for them. “We liked that Juniper Square is tailor-made for real estate investment management. It provides a solution that solves several pain points in a single package. It aligns nicely with our roadmap for areas such as investor relations, investor communications, CRM, and tax communications.”
We wanted our technology to match the quality that an investor expects from Tishman Speyer. It needed to be current, streamlined, and adaptable. We take our investor reporting and communications incredibly seriously. So, it matters to us that we get everything right. Juniper Square helps us ensure that result.
Joe Doran
CFO
The Results
Tishman Speyer has two investor relations groups that were key stakeholders in this project: Equity Capital Markets and Portfolio Management. Both teams spend a significant amount of their days interfacing with the investors, but each group uses the system differently.
“Portfolio Management is tasked with serving as a fund manager, ensuring that the funds for the projects we have are generating strong returns and are aligned with what the investors bought into originally when they came into a vehicle or a deal. As part of that, they also interact quite regularly with our big investors,” Doran shared. Juniper Square’s CRM provides them with the ability to know what’s going on with their investors, so when they pick up the phone to talk about a project, asset, or investment, they know the full context of the relationship. “They have the full picture of the real estate investments and how they’re doing.”
The Equity Capital Markets team at Tishman Speyer is a business development function tasked with originating capital for new products, new investments, and new funds. “This team needed an exceptional CRM to quickly and fully understand the history and objectives for each meeting they have.”
Juniper Square provided the one “source of truth” that benefits both teams. Having a solution that was purpose-built for real estate increased efficiency. “Our teams have to go from fund-level performance to the investment – but then account for everything that happens at the property, such as rent collection and capital expenditures. Investors care deeply about that. The level of detail and visibility Juniper Square provides is a clear benefit for us,” said Doran.
But the benefits didn’t end with the Equity Capital Markets and Portfolio Management teams. The Tax team is also a key beneficiary.
“A lot of our time, energy, structuring, and accounting is driven by very specific tax outcomes that our investors want,” Doran told us. “If you screw up, it can be extraordinarily costly and impactful to investors’ net after-tax return. Appreciating that tax nuance, dealing with the outflows of that, number of K1s, things like that is an important part of what our investors expect from us, and we have to deliver to our investors.”
Tishman Speyer’s goal is to be as technology-driven as possible to prevent human error.
Juniper Square has made us faster with fewer headaches, due to having fewer manual processes – which makes us less error-prone, especially when you’re dealing with thousands and thousands of K1s.
The company is using learnings from these teams to drive efficiency in other areas across the business. “Seeing where else we can apply some of the best practices that we’ve jointly pioneered is pretty exciting because this could benefit groups beyond the current functions who are benefiting from it,” Doran concluded.
Metrics as of 6/2/2022
