Sands Investment Group (SIG) is a commercial real estate brokerage firm specializing in buying and selling Triple Net Lease (NNN) properties for its clients. As a digital-first company, SIG provides investors with the tools and resources to buy property sites unseen. The company relies heavily on Offering Memorandums (OM) to provide its clients with more information on different investments, in addition to a multifaceted compliance workflow and approval process to ensure accuracy of information.
Its marketing and compliance teams are responsible for generating the OMs, but they used email, simple forms, and Google Sheets to get the job done. As the company grew, it needed to refine its processes. They needed a way to convert their existing systems and solutions into a single, centralized software solution.
Ryan Passe, Executive Vice President of Operations at SIG, turned to Quickbase, which delivered them the ideal solution that didn’t require a full-time developer and provided a familiar experience without significantly changing employee workflows.
Challenge
- Bottlenecks in process affecting performance and limiting ability to scale
- Complex processes and long turnaround times for offering memorandums
- Disparate systems affected reporting and transparency of deals
Solution
- Integrated Quickbase with Salesforce for seamless data access
- Quickbase app replicated their internal processes
- Proprietary Compliance tracker app to notify brokers about approvals
- Automated checklists and notifications to report back to all key parties
Benefits
- Reduced OM turnaround time by more than 2 days, increasing the number of deals a week by 30%
- Increased profit margins and more opportunities
- Increased compliance approvals
- OM downloads increased by 45%
- Satisfied brokers are winning more listings, closing more deals and growing their bottom line while providing better service to clients due to improved efficiency and turnaround times.
Founded in 2010, Sands Investment Group is a commercial real estate brokerage firm that works with private investors and institutions to ensure successful deals across the US. Over time, the company has closed over 2,800 deals, worth more than $5.5 billion in 48 states.
As of June 2021, SIG has six offices in Charleston, SC, Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Charlotte, NC, Santa Monica, CA, and Philadelphia, PA. With such an extensive network, the company relies heavily on team collaboration and efficiency to deliver quality brokerage and advisory services without the headache of traditional upkeep.
When looking for the right software solution to enhance their existing solutions, they wanted something that would complement Salesforce functionality. Their brokers were already using Salesforce to prospect and track clients, so they wanted a solution that could feed into the software, and Quickbase's Salesforce Pipelines happened to be just what they needed.
I also liked the way Quickbase makes creating dashboards and visuals easy. It also offers things that can make a complex thing look somewhat easy.
Seamlessly Automating Workflows
Pipelines provided the company an intuitive way to automate its workflows and ensure seamless integration. It has enabled them to feed deals, marketing tasks, and compliance activities from Quickbase back to Salesforce, making it easy for brokers and managers to track progress in real-time via SFDC dashboards. This has allowed them to consolidate their data sources, modernize their processes, uncover new insights, and connect disparate systems.
Their marketing team is responsible for building PDF packages, called Offering Memorandums (OM), which brokers send out to their clients. The OMs must go through an extensive approval process before being sent out and the process of building them was very hands-on. As a result, it took about five days to create the packages, limiting the company to only 10 deals a week.
With Quickbase, the company has streamlined the process using a series of queues to keep track of statuses of every deal. They have replicated their processes and functionality within Quickbase to provide employees with a familiar experience. Quickbase has allowed SIG to assign tasks to employees and monitor the statuses of existing deals, resulting in improved turnaround times and over 30 deals a week with ability to scale production even further.
The biggest thing is our turnaround time of offering memorandum. In the past, it could take five days to provide OMs, but last week we did more than we've ever done in the history of the company at a turnaround time of 2.8 days.
Additionally, Pipelines integration has allowed SIG to increase transparency for brokers. With the capability to feed the data of deals back to Salesforce, their brokers can now know the statuses of their deals and the team members working on them. This also allows them to know if a task needs their attention or input before moving to the next stage. SIG has even built a compliance tracker app that sends email notifications to brokers when their deals are approved.
Generally, the adoption of Quickbase has enabled SIG to build a scalable marketing team infrastructure and platform that outperforms expectations, powering their brokers with data insights and timely collateral. The results are increased leads, better sales, and happy clients. Also, their OM downloads increased by 45%, while their email subscriptions soared by 43%.
Thanks to Quickbase, the real ROI is that we have a happy broker that says, our team is a machine.
Plans for the Future
With Quickbase, Ryan believes that the company now has the opportunity to connect Salesforce with other systems. This opens the door to different things they can even do to improve and streamline their processes while cutting their costs, like leveraging DocuSign or Google Mail.
With this realization, SIG is motivated to take advantage of Quickbase's Pipelines to explore more opportunities and integrations. They’re looking to streamline their Google Drive operations using Quickbase to make their efficiency and turnaround times even better.
