As a GP, you know that finding the right tools to make your work more efficient is challenging.
You’re not managing a single property and account throughout your daily work — you’re managing multiple properties, accounts, and financial processes that all require consistent attention (to say nothing of the tenant management, property improvement, and other areas pulling on your attention).
A notable administrative difficulty for many GPs is the account aspect. Historically, there haven’t been any vertical-specific solutions in commercial real estate banking to centralize activities such as:
- Opening accounts for individual deals
- Distributing funds to your investors
- Making ACH payments to vendors/partners
Here, we’ll explore these activities more thoroughly and how a vertical solution such as Covercy is needed in commercial real estate banking to help you become more efficient and deliver better service to your investors and industry partners.
1. Opening Accounts
When you’ve landed a new deal, you’ll need to start collecting capital from investors, making payments to vendors for repairs and improvements, paying partners for their services, and other financial activity. Without a vertical commercial real estate banking solution, you’d need to manually open a bank account. While you can certainly open an account online, you’d still be working through an online banking platform — not a commercial real estate banking platform designed for your industry. Thus, you’d still be managing property and investor data separately.
How Covercy solves these challenges:
- You can open a new bank account associated with your deal in a matter of clicks
- We use a simple one-page application that can be completed in just a few minutes
- Most CRE bank accounts are opened and ready in a few hours to one business day
- It’s 100% self-service — no outside assistance is required
- Your information is passed to our banking partner (it’s not saved on our servers)
- You can view the status of your application (s) at any time in our platform
- If any additional information is needed, you’ll see it and can take action
- It’s part of our complete platform — simplifying your CRE toolkit
Go deeper: Learn how to further simplify CRE banking.
2. Automated Distributions
You know it well: the dreaded wire day, when it’s time to bust out those spreadsheets and start tackling calculations for investor distributions. We’ve already explored the administrative burdens that many GPs shoulder when it comes to quarterly distributions, just some of which include preparing outdated files, manually calculating distributions based on pro rata ownership, and even physically cutting and delivering checks. It’s an incredibly inefficient process that distracts you and your team from building stronger relationships with investors and managing your properties for growth.
How Covercy solves these challenges:
- Automated distributions can be initiated from two spots: the account screen or from the Distribution tab on the asset page
- The system calculates distributions based on pro rata ownership with just a click
- Distributions are processed and account balances are updated automatically
- All distributions are noted in your bank account transaction list
- Any issues will be noted directly in the bank account interface for review
- Two-factor authentication is required as part of the process for added security (more than one person can confirm as well)
3. Paying Vendors and Partners
Part of your responsibilities as a GP is managing the property, which comes with a host of expenses for everything from utilities and legal support to tenant management, repairs and improvements, and more. If you’re using separate bank accounts (or even separate banks) to issue payments for these transactions, not only are you losing time that could be better spent elsewhere, but you’re also creating administrative headaches and even security risks.
- Make any payment you want, to anyone, from a single interface
- Enter details for the payment and the recipient in one screen for ease of use
- Your account balance is updated automatically after the payment is made
- All transactions are noted and are available to review in the transaction list
- Two-factor authentication is included for verification and security
Manage All of Your Commercial Real Estate Banking Needs in One Platform
At Covercy, providing a commercial real estate banking solution is just one of the many enhancements we’ve innovated to create a complete, all-in-one solution for GPs — and we’re not stopping anytime soon. Our team is continuing to develop new solutions and features to further streamline your daily operations, consolidate your tech stack, provide greater oversight of and visibility into asset/fund performance, and provide strong service to your investor database.
Just a few of our planned additions and solutions include ACH transfers to fund accounts; conduct capital calls and receive those funds right in your account; implement account hierarchies; manage multiple bank accounts per asset; and add more payment options such as wires, charge cards, and checks. We look forward to sharing more information on these features in the coming months!
Until then, don’t hesitate to start putting the commercial real estate banking features we’ve outlined here to use for your firm. Get started with Covercy today:
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