6. Important strategies
The days of picking a few channels, developing a single strategy, making creative assets, deploying and sitting back are over.
Reaching people is easier than ever due to the proliferation of media, devices, technology and the Web. However, this plethora of channels makes it far more difficult to get their attention.
Another complexity is the very distinct audiences that we need to reach – investors on one side, and borrowers/developers on the other side.
However, one strategy that I’ve always believed in, is reaching people through events and conferences. I give major props to organizers like Crowdnetic for bringing thought leaders together for an event like Crowdfinance in NYC.
7. Valuable experience
I’ve always believed strongly in building relationships, networking, and being honest and humble in communications.
We’re still fragile as an industry, and under massive pressure to grow and scale.
I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and was independent for seven years after working in banking and at a hedge fund in Switzerland. My experience developing intellectual properties and franchises through brand licensing, and then simultaneously taking those to market through digital media, online communities and social strategies has given me a broad understanding of how to deal with complexity in a quickly-evolving world of reaching the customer.
8. Down cycles
We get this question a lot, and we believe that having a well rounded product set – and by this I mean real estate financing products – will help us move through the cycles, since different forms of financing will be in demand at different times.
Many real estate professionals will say that there is plenty of money to be made during a downturn, just as traders and hedge funds are able to make money during cyclical market corrections.
It’s a matter of diversification, some timing, and deep understanding of where the market is moving.
We’ll go through each cycle, and each local market cycle, by being close to the customers – both investors, and borrowers, who are experienced, knowledgeable and themselves understand their local market, demand, and trends.
9. Managing growth
A few key challenges have been trying to grow on a very constrained, bootstrapped budget; raising that first significant round of capital; staffing and key hires; the see-saw of too much/too little capital vs. too much/too little deal flow; managing expectations of investors, customers, industry.
Our underwriting is overseen by very experienced underwriters and a credit committee. We’ve built technology that consumes bluechip data sources, aggregates and performs predictive and trend analysis and is then passed through our custom pricing and risk models.
Internally, our staff can investigate each market from the perspective of each of our data sources, compared to our current portfolio performance, and use our scenario development tools to model possible events in each new market.
