Top 4 Time Management Tips for CRE Sponsors

Charles Darwin once said, “A man who dares waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life”.

And time is certainly of the essence in CRE. You have equity to raise, projects to manage, and likely an inquisitive investor base demanding your attention. Learning to effectively manage your time is crucial to your firm’s success.

Read ahead to discover four ways to increase efficiency and dedicate more of your time back to value-add activities.

1) Leverage Technology

Don’t overburden yourself by trying to juggle back-office tasks on top of your more important, value-add responsibilities. Emerging CRE technology allows you to automate your back office and boost productivity.

For example, RealPage RealPage IMS’ Investor Dashboard enables investors to access all property information, statuses, distributions, and documents in a single location (including K-1s), which means investors no longer need to send one-off questions  or requests for information to their sponsor.

In addition, a CRM serves as a central database to store investor information and track, analyze, and record all of the information you have about investors and your interactions with them, both simplifying and scaling investor management and engagement. Further, a real estate CRM has industry-specific features, functions, and fields built right in.

Your investors can also update their own information through the investor portal, saving you time and ensuring that your contacts remain up-to-date, well-organized, and easily accessible. In fact, with real estate CRM software, sponsors report locating investor information up to 76% faster.

Leveraging technology lets you automate back-office processes and focus on value-add aspects of your operations while keeping investors happy with real-time, on-demand data.

2) Hire the Right Team

You can’t do everything yourself, and you shouldn’t try to. In order to successfully delegate, you must have a team you can trust. Deanna Farnell, CFO of CGI Strategies, recently joined us for a webinar to discuss leadership and best practices for talent acquisition. Her advice is to hire partners, not employees. “You want out-of-the-box thinkers and innovators – people who know how to utilize and embrace technology solutions; people who are working smarter and not harder”. Once you have a quality staff of investment management professionals, utilize existing technology like IMS’ CRM to assign investor profiles to your team and track valuable metrics related to investor engagement. You can set tasks for your team to maintain and develop investor relationships and trust that this clear and concise delegation will result in boosted productivity.

The right team will understand your goals and vision and will be able to work unsupervised to hold down the fort while you turn your attention to asset acquisition and other important decisions.

3) Streamline Your Capital Raise

It can be very time consuming to manually review your notes on prospective investors and try to identify who the best fits would be for a particular project. Leverage tools to target prospects, invite them to invest, and guide them seamlessly through the process. This saves you time while empowering the investor. Automate as much of your capital raise as you can to free up your time for other tasks.

4) Stick to Your Routine

Stay in the driver’s seat of your life and business. Decide what hours to accept calls and to book meetings and appointments, then stick to your routine. You’re involved in high-profile deals, which add to stress and can negatively impact your physical and mental health. Most smartphones now have advanced scheduling features to help you stay on track and meet your personal health and time-management goals. You can extend the same goals to your business through product features and minimize disruptions to your schedule by utilizing tools like email auto-responders.

The old adage “time is money” rings especially true for CRE sponsors. Leverage technology, hire the right people, integrate processes and stick to a rigid routine to increase productivity and scale your firm.

To further enhance your firm’s time-management strategy, download our free best practice checklist: 6 Ways to Boost Productivity.