JLL Spark Invests in Dealpath

By Barbra Murray

Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner, co-CEOs, JLL Spark

JLL Spark has given Dealpath, the leading global provider of cloud-based technology for evaluating and managing real estate transactions, a big vote of confidence. A division of global commercial real estate services firm JLL, JLL Spark announced that it recently made a strategic investment in the real estate deal management software company.

“Interest in real estate as an investment is increasing at a fast pace and real estate investors are looking for things that can give them an edge, while improving their knowledge. Dealpath is perfectly poised to address this,” Mihir Shah, co-CEO of JLL Spark along with Yishai Lerner, told Commercial Property Executive.

Established in 2014, Dealpath is a purpose-built software platform that acts as a central hub for deal evaluation and execution by assembling deal information, critical property data and transactional documents in a single workspace. It combines collaboration tools, workflow automation, reporting, pipeline tracking and visualized deal analytics. The advantages of the real estate deal management software are seen in the numbers.

With Dealpath, the removal of certain manual and repetitive tasks yields an annual average ROI exceeding 475 percent. The enhancement of communication, centralized information and process standardization, results in an 18 percent decrease in due diligence and underwriting errors. Additionally, deal turnaround time drops by an average of 87 percent through the automatic collection and formatting of data into custom real estate templates. The number of deals evaluated increases 25 percent and weekly productivity rises by 50 percent.

Mihir Shah, co-CEO, JLL Spark

“One of the most compelling things about Dealpath is the value it brings real estate investors. Before Dealpath, real estate investors had no way of organizing their investments—where they were, what stage they were in, and what still needed to be done,” Shah said. “With Dealpath, investors can see everything in one place, reducing deal turnaround time, underwriting errors and the time it takes to evaluate a deal. It’s a big gap in the market and one that Dealpath fulfills well.”

Currently, Dealpath supports more than $500 billion in transaction volume with a global client list in the hundreds. JLL Spark hasn’t disclosed the monetary value of its investment in Dealpath. The company made the infusion through its JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, which was launched in June 2018 for the purpose of investing as much as $100 million in real estate technology companies that leverage technology to improve commercial real estate activities such as development, property management, leasing and investing.

Sparking change

JLL established JLL Spark in July 2017, creating a global business to enhance its extensive CRE technology, or proptech, capabilities. The new division made its first strategic acquisition in March 2018 with the purchase of Stessa, an SaaS-based real estate technology platform for investors in income properties to track their portfolios with ease and cost efficiency.

JLL Spark’s investment in Dealpath comes on the heels of the company’s participation in a Series A round, spearheaded by Sequoia Capital and TLV Partners, that raised $18 million for real estate investment technology company Skyline AI.

Images courtesy of JLL Spark