A local startup operation is looking to bring better insights to commercial real estate investors.
Lobby CRE, part of Thirty Capital, is an asset management platform that compiles data for multiple aspects of real estate, such as operations, debt and equity. The platform leverages that data to better inform investors about their portfolios, including how market dynamics are affecting them, and to drive faster decision-making.
The platform, which launched in 2019, is quickly gaining traction. It has grown from a couple dozen users close to the founding team to more than 500 organizations today, including Charlotte's Crescent Communities.
CEO Anne Hollander said the platform is not a case of building technology for technology's sake. The team is grounded in the CRE industry.
Lobby CRE's founder, entrepreneur Rob Finlay, comes from a strong background in real estate with decades of experience. He now sits on the board. Hollander, who already knew Finlay, joined less than a year ago, but has more than a decade of experience in the industry.
"A lot of folks run into the tech world with very little understanding or knowledge about the true issues that the industry overall faces," Hollander said. "We're bringing that experience, as well as the experience of all of our friends and colleagues, into a product that can really begin to serve and create a lot of value for real estate organizations interested in harnessing and leveraging data to make better decisions."
Lobby CRE works primarily in the middle market, a sector it plans to continue focusing on, Hollander said.
The team, based in South End, is comprised of about 40 full-time employees. It has recently added employees in sales and marketing, implementation and customer success roles. The plan is to grow headcount by another 15%, Hollander said.
A tight real estate market creates more opportunities for Lobby CRE. Hollander expects companies to need more operational oversight as the market changes, especially with monitoring costs amid inflation and supply chain issues. Rising interest rates also make portfolio management vital on the debt side, she said. Lobby CRE brings the many aspects of running a portfolio to one place, despite real estate firms historically taking a siloed approach.
Hollander said Lobby CRE plans to keep expanding and improving what the management system can do.
"With technology, it's just never done," she said. "We really see LobbyCRE as being that centralized hub to understand the asset, the investment, as well as the different stakeholders who are involved within that, and so as we think about our roadmap going into the future, it's really beginning to build out what that ecosystem truly looks like from a technology perspective."
