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Photo of Iri Amirav.

JLL, Slate Partner to Commercialize Asset Management Software

JLL and Slate Asset Management have partnered on a joint-venture designed to commercialize one-stop technology that integrates data across the commercial real estate asset-management lifecycle.

The software is currently available in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The partners plan to roll it out in the Asia-Pacific market and other global regions in the future.

The technology, known as JLL Asset Beacon, was developed by Toronto-based Slate for Canadian asset managers over the past 20 years and is being enhanced and revised on an ongoing basis through the joint-venture. Slate credits the technology with underpinning the growth of the firm’s US$9-billion business.

The software centralizes diverse datasets, including financial, operational, leasing, and ESG metrics, into a secure, user-friendly hub.

By offering real-time data visualization and reporting capabilities, JLL Asset Beacon empowers CRE professionals to optimize portfolio performance, identify risks and uncover value-creation opportunities, says Slate.

“It’s very easy to access it through through the Web application,” said Iri Amirav of JLL, a technology specialist who is serving as a co-CEO of the joint-venture. “I would say a lot of the value comes from the way that we do the data management, because Slate has been working for 10-plus years with different CRE data sets in software, such as integrating with MRI and Yardi and and Argus and so forth.

“We’re able to really centralize and normalize the data across different systems. So, it’s much easier to build a universal semantic layer, so it’s much easier to integrate, to interrogate the data, to purify it and, therefore, [it’s] able to provide our end clients with a much better way to look at the information in real time.”

The joint-venture with JLL marks Slate’s foray into commercial proptech as the company aims to make it available to the entire CRE industry at a time of uncertainty around valuations and pricing.

The platform integrates JLL’s generative AI capabilities, powered by the recently launched JLL Falcon platform. Features like lease abstraction, natural language queries, and entity resolution will allow users to organize and derive actionable insights from proprietary data more efficiently than ever before, according to the partners.

The new software-as-a-service platform aims to address the industry’s pricing and cost-related challenges by providing a single source of certainty for investors, managers, and partners navigating increasingly complex portfolios.

Brandon Schwartz, a Slate senior vice-president, said the technology underpins everything that the company has done on the asset-management side of its business. Schwartz played an active role in the software’s development and helped form the joint-venture with JLL.

“In commercial real estate today, you’re using so many different sources to get to your data, and it’s all scattered across so many different spots,” he said. “We found so many asset managers were spending a lot of time on step zero of their work was just gathering information. At least, we were at Slate.

“So we wanted to build a system that could aggregate data, and it really became the source of truth, and underpins everything that Slate has done today on the asset-management side, because it had everything we needed, from our buildings under one place, what worked as both a workbench and a data room.

“What was super helpful to us was, it was built by real estate people, for real estate people, as opposed to using a tech consultant or tech-focused approach, which really let it be a truly valuable asset for our team.”

The system allows users to go from the “ground floor” of the data from a lease startup to end and monitor and evaluate such factors as option deadlines, rental such aspects as experiences and tenants according to industry groups.

All of the data is filterable and sortable.

“So, really, it can that asset-management toolkit, because in the asset manager’s role of being the boss of the building, this is their dashboard and their command centre to understand all the ins and outs,” said Schwartz.

After initially using the software internally, Slate decided to offer it to a key client, JLL. The firms spent about two years enhancing the software before launching the joint-venture and commercialization.

“I’d say, predominantly, it will cover the major food groups of commercial real estate, and by that I mean office, retail, industrial [and] multi-family,” said Schwartz. “Now, we’re starting to tweak it to cover more of those edge cases, those more niche asset classes, like data centres, like storage, like student housing, things that are similar to those four that I mentioned earlier, but may have some more tweaks around the edge in terms of customization.”

Amir Leitersdorf serves as the joint-venture’s other co-CEO along with Amirav, while Schwartz is also playing an active leadership role. Leitersdorf and Amirav, both season technology entrepeneurs, joined JLL through its 2021 acquisition of Skyline AI.

Leitersdorf is based in Tel Aviv, while Amirav works out of New York and Schwartz is situated in Toronto.

JLL is a leading global commercial real estate and investment management company based in Chicago with Canadian operations headquartered in Toronto.

Slate is a global alternative-investment platform specializing in real estate equity, credit, securities, and infrastructure.

Pictured: Iri Amirav, co-CEO of the joint-venture

Photo: Courtesy of Slate Asset Management

Read More News Stories About: JLL Canada
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Inside The Story

Iri AmiravBrandon Schwartz

About Monte Stewart

Monte Stewart serves as Content Director - Canada for Connect Commercial Real Estate. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monte provides daily news coverage of major Canadian commercial real estate markets, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He has written about the real estate sector for various media outlets and Avison Young since the early 2000s. In addition, he has covered sports, general news and business for several leading wire services and publications, including The Canadian Press, The Associated Press, The Calgary Herald, The Globe and Mail, Research Money, The Daily Oil Bulletin, Natural Gas World and The Toronto Star. Monte is active in his community as a youth basketball coach and raises funds for such charitable causes as Movember.

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