Dealpath Case Study
To support all of our interconnected platforms, we wanted a better pipeline management solution that would afford independence, while rolling insightful data up into one platform.
About Blackstone Real Estate and Its Technology & Innovations Group
Blackstone is the largest owner of commercial real estate globally, with a $550 billion portfolio and $298 billion of investor capital under management [as of March 31, 2022]. Blackstone owns and operates assets across every major geography and sector, including logistics, residential, office, hospitality and retail. Blackstone’s Technology & Innovations team is focused on implementing, managing and optimizing best-in-class technology solutions to support the firm, its portfolio companies and Blackstone’s professionals, including those in the Real Estate business.
As a global leader in real estate investing with portfolio companies across the world, Blackstone Real Estate wanted a way to streamline information sharing. To source, analyze, uncover and pursue the most compelling opportunities, the business requires extensive data input and collaboration.
Each aspect of Blackstone Real Estate deploys capital and manages data based on unique processes, but it was critical that pipeline, analytics and performance metrics be visible across the organization to inform daily decisions and senior management.
In order to track the live active disposition pipeline, Blackstone employees manually aggregated key metrics and updates for each deal into a text-based report. As the business continued scaling exponentially, technology leaders identified the opportunity to implement a stronger system of record that the firm could rely on for real-time data.
“To support all of our interconnected platforms, we wanted a better pipeline management solution that would afford independence, while rolling insightful data up into one platform,” said Danielle Gannon, Technology & Innovations Associate, Blackstone.
Blackstone’s investment platforms are continuously evolving, which means it’s absolutely essential to have a platform that our global team can trust to find real-time information. As our command center, Dealpath helps us deploy millions in capital on a global scale.
After evaluating the platform, Blackstone selected Dealpath as its Real Estate deal management software solution in spring of 2020. This marked a major firmwide shift in pipeline tracking and provided automation to significant reporting outputs as both business and technology leaders collaborated to fine-tune reporting, dashboards and data streams.
At launch, Blackstone Real Estate leveraged Dealpath to track, execute and report on acquisition, disposition, debt origination and refinancing deals across both its real estate debt and equity businesses. Additionally, the platform provided visibility into real-time deal and property data to stakeholders in other groups, including the Finance, Portfolio Management and Legal & Compliance teams. For Blackstone Real Estate, the ability to pull a report at any given time with bespoke data fields is paramount.
“Thanks to Dealpath’s configurability and close collaboration throughout the implementation process, we were able to standardize our key deal metrics and property-level information in the system,” Danielle said.
Dealpath has also heightened the Blackstone Technology team’s visibility into how users engage with the platform. From their dashboard, the team can view benchmark engagement metrics, such as:
Following strong adoption across the organization due to ease of use and a clean user interface, Dealpath’s pipeline tracking, standardized workflows, reporting and dashboards have become deeply embedded in Blackstone’s day-to-day deal and portfolio management activities, from analysts to senior management.
“Dealpath is the hub where all of our deals live at both the beginning and end of the funnel,” Danielle said. “This continuity enables our deal teams to analyze the full asset lifecycle with reliable information, together with asset-level relationships.”
Managing deals in Dealpath has enabled Blackstone Real Estate to automate some processes and streamline others, reducing manual data entry. With fewer data request emails to answer, deal teams now have the bandwidth to review more deals and analyze opportunities under a closer lens.
Dealpath has helped Blackstone Real Estate accomplish three crucial objectives:
“Blackstone’s investment platforms are continuously evolving, which means it’s absolutely essential to have a platform that our global team can trust to find real-time information,” Danielle shared. “As our command center, Dealpath helps us deploy millions in capital on a global scale.”
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