How to Beat Inefficiency in Real Estate Transactions

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is CRE for everyone. CRE for everyone. Thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week. Week, week. This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, we have Asaf Raz. Asaf is the head of

Agora's marketing and a growth expert with Agora. Asaf, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Asaf Raz (00:37)
Aviva, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about this.

Aviva (00:40)
Yeah, I met Aasof maybe a month ago at the Real Estate X Gala. It was essentially a super fun party in New York City where a bunch of tech and enthusiastic, focused real estate minds got together, dressed really fancy and had a party. So I'm glad we connected Aasof.

And I'm glad that we got to hop on the podcast shortly thereafter. Asaf, tell me about who you are, where you came from, and Agora, and what that is and how you got there.

Asaf Raz (01:26)
So yeah, thank you so much Aviva for this introduction. I love the Gala by the way, if anyone didn't see our video of the Gala, you're welcome to go ahead and watch on Twitter. Aviva shared it and also an exclusive interview with Aviva. So we're very happy about this. I'm Asaf, I'm the Head of Marketing, as you said, at Agora. We're a comprehensive real estate investment management platform. So essentially we help GPs, developers, operators to run all of their LP relationships. Anything from fundraising to investor onboarding.

distributions reporting and all of their talks and bookkeeping operations all enabled throughout technology with a very simple easy to use interface both for the GPs and their LPs and their investor portal. So that's generally what we do. I have a history of about 12 years now in marketing, both B2C and B2B. So both consumer marketing and business to business marketing. And in the last few years, I've been while working at Agora, I've been helping a lot of

CRE experts and real estate firms enhance their own marketing by helping them building their websites, their online presence, and their brand. So I do have a lot of insight into commercial real estate marketing specifically.

Aviva (02:39)
So what are some trends that you see in commercial real estate marketing in 2024? Yeah, in 2024.

Asaf Raz (02:50)
Yeah. So I think that things are changing, right? If we're looking at commercial real estate, let's take it 10, 15 years ago, it was a very traditional market. It was very hard for people to actually be exposed and show their faces, putting it like social media wasn't even a thing, right? Most of the people were still using their Rolodex and their phone and their Excel sheets and their personal relationships and slowly building their network. And...

slowly but surely this generation is changing. Aviva, you're one of them. Like you're one of those that are leading this change. And we saw this also in the gala where it was essentially a meetup of social media experts on X or Twitter, formerly Twitter. So the trend that I'm seeing is not a trend from this year. It's a trend that has been happening for the last 10 years, actually, 10 to 15 years of people exposing themselves and their businesses more online, on social media.

And having these type of conversations about real estate and about what they do and putting their brand and their name out there, something that hasn't happened before. A lot of them, just a lot of developers, owners just want it to be behind the scenes. And now they realize that in order to get an audience and to get people to be interested and gain trust with future partners, co -GPs, LPs, they have to be a little bit more exposed. They have to start having online conversations and they have to become thought leaders.

in the space and we can dive into that Aviva as much as you want. But these are the main trends that I see that we'll see people from even larger firms working on their thought leadership, working on social media. Some of them are only lurkers, right? But some of them will actively do something. But we understand that this is where everything is happening online. So both on their websites and all the technical marketing stuff that are really not interesting, but they're important. And obviously what's happening on social media, their brand and their presence.

This is a big change this year that I'm seeing.

Aviva (04:47)
So, you know, it's funny, my father syndicated a portfolio of warehouses between 1999 and 2015. And he might as well have just written everybody's name in a book. You know, it's like the most old school it could get. Like I finally got our office to get the partners into an online ledger.

Asaf Raz (05:06)
Hehehehe

Aviva (05:17)
just in recent years. So, Agora is what social media has done, correct me if I'm wrong, what social media has done for the modern broker, syndicator, thought leader in commercial real estate. Agora is a software that provides us, GPs and LPs and syndicators, the capabilities to

transact and interact in a 2024 capability to better serve the partners. Is this, is that correct?

Asaf Raz (05:56)
Mm -hmm.

Exactly. Exactly. And I'll give you an example, right? Let's take this high level, for example. You're having a lot of conversations online, offline. You're having a lot of conversations. These relationships that you're building, it's a good interest for everybody, but we're always looking for a way to capitalize on those relationships in order to have, for good partners, a win -win situation where both the partners are enjoying this relationship. In bad cases, the relationship doesn't go that same way. But...

There's always this need to capitalize on those relationships. Now what happens is when you have those, let's say, GPLP relationships, now they're raising capital for a new deal or they're syndicating a new deal. They want to garner the interest of their investors, their portfolio, their network that they've built either online or offline to gain their interest into a new deal and try to get, let's say, the LPs to invest more money in a deal. And this is where Agora comes in. Where we start is where...

The GPs are trying to capitalize on that GPLP relationship or their partners or co -GPs. And it starts when they raise capital for a deal. So they have this entire way to market their deals through our fundraising tool. So they can put the images and maps, a little bit luck to what you do, get commitments, sign subscriptions, anything on the fundraising side, and then onboard their new and existing investors into the deal.

and run that relationship on an ongoing basis through emails, categorizing everything under the same CRM setting and having everything vertically aligned to what they need in real estate. So it's not just your everyday tool, it's dedicated for those relationships specifically.

Aviva (07:37)
It's so funny because, you know, I learned all of this by my old man. And his whole thing is just like, you just pick up the phone. And it's like, yes, I love picking up the phone. I love schmoozing and talking and. But these intricacies that we can use a software like Agora to expedite.

Asaf Raz (07:44)
Hehehe.

Ha ha ha.

Aviva (08:06)
can actually lead to better interactions, better transactions, and more deals just because instead of me being on the phone telling you the super macro points of a deal, it sounds like those are accessible via Agora, and it leaves the oper, you know, you can automate getting that information to your partners, whereas,

prior to this type of software. It was all literally was picking up the phone and manual. Yeah.

Asaf Raz (08:40)
Manual. Exactly. Exactly. And I give you a great example. Do you have, well, it's a little bit personal, but do you have an IRA fund, for example, or any fund that you're running? Okay, great. So if you run it, you have an IRA fund and you want to wake up tomorrow morning and you want to check out what's the status of the IRA fund, what would you do? Right? You'll go to the website. Exactly. You go to your Vanguard app, you open that, you log in and you see what's up, right? This is an experience that people...

Aviva (08:51)
Yes.

I go to my Vanguard app. Yeah.

Asaf Raz (09:10)
They already expect that from the IRA funds, from their Roth. You know, like they understand that this is what they need. But then when it came to real estate, people were like, whatever, we can do it on Excel sheets and send emails and phone calls. Like, you know, like your dad, it's the same thing. And then now, nowadays, investors are much more educated as to what they can have and what they need. Like, again, like when you're going to your Vanguard app to see what's up with your investment. And it's we're at a point where LPs would not accept investing into a deal.

without having this transparency and the ability to actually look at their deals and their performance of their deals by themselves through a very easy to use portal, through an easy login. I can see everything, all my documents, all my reporting, my distributions, how much money I got, how much money I committed to. It just makes a lot of sense. And honestly, I don't understand how it didn't happen at this level so far. And I'm happy that we're part of that.

Aviva (09:55)
Wow.

Asaf Raz (10:07)
new generation of real estate deals.

Aviva (10:11)
It's also cool because it, look, with syndications and with doing deals, you always wanna be honest, right? You always wanna do good by your partners, but the reality of the world is that there are bad apples. You know, I'd like to think there are few and far between, but giving the partners the ability to, you know, I watched the Bernie Madoff documentary and they were pretty much like, people would call him and he would,

Asaf Raz (10:27)
Mm -hmm.

Aviva (10:41)
intimidate them out of information and this is the exact opposite that whereas it's like this is the information you know hub and I would like to think it will help syndicators and bad syndicators you know just erase that small percent of negative experiences while transacting which is cool because you shouldn't be doing

Asaf Raz (11:05)
Exactly. Exactly.

Aviva (11:10)
bad by your partners anyway, and this will help, the transparency is there.

Asaf Raz (11:16)
Exactly. So it's and I think it's it's built out of two. We have like those two main pillars that we're thinking about all the time. A, we're thinking about those relationships with your LPs. You know, as a good GP, you have a goal for your LPs to be happy. You want your investors to be happy. You want to create transparency for them so they'll come back, right? When you raise for your next fund or your next your next deal, you want them to come back. If they have a bad experience, they won't do that. Even by the way.

Sometimes they'll have a great experience and you know, in today's market, they might even have to put in more capital or even lose some money. And they'll still be back because they trust you and because you're transparent, because you give them a look behind the scenes of what they're actually doing, right? And they don't feel like they're being manipulated out of the data. So this is the one thing that we're looking at. The second thing that we're looking at is the efficiency of the partner, the GP itself, himself. When you run those syndications, running things manually,

and you know that it's a huge headache reporting waterfalls distribution. You know, think of a company with a hundred investors, right? And you need to create a K1. You need to create a K1 for each individual investor. And you sit on those PDFs and those documents and you start editing the names and making sure all the information is correct. And you need to do this a hundred times, right? Or let's talk about subscripting documents, for example. If you do that manually, every investor,

has different terms or every investor class has different terms. You need to build those terms into their subscription document separately and they need to sign on. It's a whole mess. But that's our second pillar is automating those processes in a way that it's really easy for them to create those individual subscription documents according to the agreements, building their LPAs into their waterfalls and running their distributions just like that. It's like they click a button, everything is automated, they get boom, this is what everybody needs to get.

And they can actually, by the way, send that money through our platform. So all the payments go through Agora. So essentially they'll do the distributions and capital calls through the platform. So this is how efficient it becomes. So it's both the investor experience and the efficiency of this entire investment management life cycle.

Aviva (13:17)
Whoa.

Damn, that's cool, that's impressive. It's a one -stop shop.

Asaf Raz (13:29)
Eh, eh, eh, one -stop shop. We also provide, we also help them in order to increase that efficiency. We provide tech -enabled CPA services that include both their talks. So we do their 1065 and K1s. And we take care of their books with our bookkeeping services. Everything happens through the platform, but they do get a dedicated CPA from Agora that helps them run that business. It's more efficient, it's cheaper, it's faster.

And yeah, we're really proud of those things. We think that this creating this comprehensive solution for them is really something that GPs and LPs need when investing in commercial real estate.

Aviva (14:07)
So as the head of marketing for such a, you know, look, I know your target demographic is an older generation. It's getting younger. We're getting there. But as the head of marketing, what do you find to be your most effective methods to get Agora out there to the general public?

Asaf Raz (14:18)
It is.

So it's very interesting. When I got into Agora, it was three years ago, I was new to the market. I knew nothing about commercial real estate. I owned one apartment for myself and that was it. And I didn't know anything else, right? And I said, okay, let's learn. And what happened over time is I discovered two things, well, three actually. The first thing is there's a very strong offline relationship and networking in this community between GPs and LPs and other GPs and their co -gp... There's a lot of...

Aviva (14:41)
Good.

Asaf Raz (14:59)
offline networking that happens in events and conferences and meetups, things like the gala, right? And this is one channel that I knew that I'm going to have to leverage. And at a certain point, they're going to have to see me and know me and we're going to have to shake hands and see each other. Right? So that's one thing that I realized very quickly, but there are two things that I was very surprised about. A, take, let's take a bigger company, a bigger enterprise in real estate, right? And commercial real estate that raises capital from LPs and they're running within our

syndication or GPLP model. You know, they're big companies. They have, they can have between 10 to 60, 70, 80 employees. One of those employees, especially in fundraising acquisition investor relations, one of them is going to be younger. And that person is going to have to be the person that goes up, up the ladder and says, Hey, I'm sorry, Mr. Manager, Mr. Managing Partner, Mr. CEO. We can't keep running investor relations this way.

So what we did is we started creating a lot of influence through that younger generations. It's actually stepping into those positions in those companies. And that has created influence upwards where the managing partner now says, we really need this. Now let's go back and have the conversation. So that's the second thing that we really leveraged on and put a lot of emphasis on. That was really, really interesting. And then the third thing is, and this is all interconnected, we also see that younger generation taking over those management positions.

Because well, the older generation is, it's not that they're done, they're doing business, they're doing really good business. I met a lot of people at ICSC this week that are doing incredible work. But they understand that the next generation is coming and they're building, and that next generation is building the infrastructure. And that's the third thing that we did. We connected to those, what we call the lurkers of this industry. And you'd be surprised how many of those...

older generation people in real estate, they're on Twitter, X, they're on Facebook, they're on LinkedIn, you know, they're reading online, they're reading online magazines about real estate, they're active, they're just not showing it. So these three things that we've done has really created a difference for us and really helped us understand how this market works. And it was surprising for me because when I joined, I was like, they're old people, what do they know? Like they don't want, they don't want this, we just need to shake hands.

And then I started doing posting on social and all of a sudden I see that they're there, which was surprising and it's positive. I think it's great.

Aviva (17:28)
Yeah.

It's so funny, I call it the millennialization of real estate. I have a different, a little bit different perspective. So as brokers, I get the phone call where it's, my dad told me to find someone and I hopped online and I found you. So it's the same thing where it's like the older generation is looking towards the younger generation and going, figure this out.

Asaf Raz (17:59)
Exactly.

Aviva (18:01)
It's yours one day, get it going. And where else is the younger generation going to, you know, we go online for everything. We go online to date, we go online to bank, we go online to shop, you know, so it's like, it's just our reality. And it's a fun place to be, because you can connect with people all over the world who are like -minded and...

Asaf Raz (18:12)
Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly.

Aviva (18:31)
garner and foster relationships and make money and find success and happiness and.

Asaf Raz (18:36)
Exactly. Look at Bob Knakal, for example. Bob is a great, great example. He started doing social media, what, two years ago, three years ago, maybe? He really created a huge following for himself when it comes to this industry on X. And it's been transformational for his business. He's a famous man, you know, and he wasn't before. And now his business is thriving because of this, because he understood that this can happen online. And he's...

Aviva (18:46)
Yeah.

Asaf Raz (19:07)
He's only these like, he's the not one of those first sprouts in that, in that domain that are kind of going in there and you're doing that too. And Don, StripMallGuy is doing that too. Like we have a bunch of great persona, Sean Sweeney. So we have a bunch of people that are just doing a lot of, they're doing great work in building their brand. And I think it's in a few years, we're going to see this exploding. By the way, I've been, people have been laughing at me a lot when I say the commercial really say there's going to be a huge buzz.

in the next three to five years on TikTok. It's going to be huge on TikTok. And people are like, no one's going to watch TikTok. My dad watches, my dad is 64. He watches TikTok. Like, of course, it's great. So it's going to be there too. And I really believe in this transition. I think that's going to be a big, big trend in the next few years.

Aviva (19:46)
yeah, yeah, I know.

yeah, hey, that's the funny thing. I like going to the airport and I'm at the airport and looking at people's phones and seeing what they're doing on the phones, because I feel like the average person thinks he's not average, but we're all actually really doing the exact same thing. And so it's always younger kids on Snapchat, people our age on Instagram, or TikTok, and it's like...

Asaf Raz (20:08)
Hahaha.

We are, exactly.

Aviva (20:26)
I just love kind of like making that tally in my head, like what people are doing and it's fascinating. And we don't control where the attention is, we only control if we choose to meet people where they're at. And you have to be nimble and you have to be humble because somebody like Bob Knakal who dominates commercial real estate in...

Asaf Raz (20:43)
Exactly.

Aviva (20:54)
New York City could have looked at this whole thing and said, screw it, I don't need it, I crush it without it. But he's humble and he's, look what it, and he, yeah, he was open to the change and it exploded his business and it was all really, really well deserved. So.

Asaf Raz (21:04)
Exactly.

I love you.

And I'll add one more thing to this and I talked about this at the beginning. But it's also, it's not only doing it, but it's also understanding how to capitalize on it. So, okay, I have followers online, people are listening to me, what do I do now? And people don't understand that this is work. You both need to build your brand and you need to capitalize and manage those relationships. You know, people are going to DM you. Are you going to answer them? People are going to comment on your posts. Are you going to comment back? Like...

How far does it go? And honestly, the deeper you go, the more successful you'll be. That's the secret sauce. Communicate with people, engage with them, have a conversation, answer them when they answer your post, answer them on DMs. That's how the relationships are built. They're not built through, I have 100K followers, okay, what's next? Look at StripMallGuy. He's consistently communicating with his community, not only through posting, but also through going through those...

through the thread and answering and having a conversation with them. And I think that's the secret sauce. People think it's all about followers and posting and look at me. No, you need to manage it. You need to uphold it if you want to capitalize on it. I think that's my big like sentence about it.

Aviva (22:29)
Which is funny because it's not any different in real life. Like that's how you make connections and relationships in real life. So this is not groundbreaking. gosh.

Asaf Raz (22:38)
And we can debate what is real life. Yeah, we can debate what is real life, right? You know what I mean? Like it's becoming one, but yeah. Yeah.

Aviva (22:46)
Yeah. Asaf, before I have you shout out yourself and Agora, a question that we always end the podcast with is what makes you happy with what you're doing today in commercial real estate?

Asaf Raz (23:09)
That's really cool. That's a very good question. Generally speaking, I'm extremely happy with what I do. I wake up very happy every morning. And I think the reason for that is I'm in a market where I'm playing or I'm consolidating two of the things that I like the most. I like tech a lot and marketing in tech specifically. And I also love real estate. I love it being so tangible. Right.

I love that you can see it, touch it, feel it, smell it. It's real. People pay for it because they need to live in it sometimes, most of the time, sometimes if it's in whatever asoclust it is. But as an example, I love that. And my ability to connect that makes me really, really happy. And building those relationships also, personally for myself, putting aside Agora, I think it's great. It's been doing great things for me. And I met you, which is also part of...

It's a part of the good things that make me happy. So I think that's the main thing that makes me happy about this industry.

Aviva (24:14)
Hey, I love it and I will see you there, because I couldn't agree more. Asaf, where can the general public find you, follow you and look into Agora?

Asaf Raz (24:28)
Okay, so as I said, and I'll do it really quick, Agora is a comprehensive real estate investment management platform from fundraising, investor onboarding, CRM, data rooms, reporting, distributions, capital calls, payments, bookkeeping, tax, everything happens under one place for any interactions between GPs and LPs. You can find Agora at agorareal .com, A -G -O -R -A -R -E -A -L .com. You can read more about us there.

We're growing very very quickly. We just announced our serious be funding of 34 million dollars led by Kummer Capital And backed up again by insight partners and Aleph our former investors It's been a tremendous amazing growth experience for me being a company like this And you can read more about it on our website and our social media channels both on LinkedIn and on X and on Facebook

Aviva (25:25)
Your success and Agora success is well deserved and I'm excited to see what y 'all do with it and and hopefully dig in soon so thank you Asaf for being on this show and For everybody listening. We'll see you next week

Asaf Raz (25:29)
Thank you so much, Aviva.

Come on.

Thank you, Aviva.