When I meet real estate finance professionals who use the incumbent tools in our industry, their first question is always “Can Assess do X, Y, and Z?”. After I reply that it can, the next question is always “So how much does it cost?”. To their surprise, we are able to offer our product at a price an order of magnitude lower than any competitive product in the space, with plans at $100/month and $1000/year. This may seem implausibly low, especially for funds that have hundreds of millions in assets under management, but for us this is business as usual.

In this article, I’ll review how Assess+RE leverages cloud-based technology to do what no one else has managed to do: revolutionize financial modeling and underwriting while making it accessible to everyone, not just to the few who can afford it.

When we started Assess, we came in with a few initial goals:

1. Most importantly, we knew we had to impact the quality of valuation tools in real estate, improving the accuracy, speed, and experience of financial underwriting.
2. Secondly, we aimed to increase the availability of educational resources and information  – knowledge and experience in real estate come from disparate (and often quite expensive) sources, and we wanted to do better.
3. Lastly, we wanted to offer an enterprise solution accessible to everyone. If we could package a powerful, accessible product at a moderate price, we knew we could support businesses of all sizes in all markets.

We have achieved these goals. The Assess+RE platform is fully-featured and competitive with any existing platform, without the high price tag and prohibitive up-front costs. The truth behind our success is no secret – it’s innovation. Every day Silicon Valley announces new tech companies that are disrupting traditional businesses. Our ability to offer our product at this price begins with the ability to deliver our application on the web and ends with taking advantage of the efficiency and optimization achievable with tech.

Our product can go by many names: software as a service (SaaS), a cloud platform, a web app, and so on. Fundamentally, they all mean that the business logic of the application runs on a secure remotely-located server rather than on the user’s computer. At first glance, this seems fairly inconsequential, but there is a reason this approach has become the industry standard, as the upsides for a business are massive.

Our “technology-first” approach has enabled us to run lean and iterate quickly. We immediately recognized several benefits:

1. Our application runs in a consolidated platform with centralized resources, so we can optimize it to respond to both business and customer needs. This allows us to minimize costs and continuously improve performance for all users.
2. All of our tools for business communicate automatically – customer support, subscriptions, sales and marketing, and the application itself all integrate in order to reduce our overhead.
3. We automate many of our processes so that our business scales efficiently. This reduces errors, allowing our team members to focus on building features and improving the customer experience.
4. Our product is built with modularization in mind, which means that we can offer a base-level product at one rate, but offer more sophisticated and customized modules as add-on features. As user needs evolve, so will the product.
5. Our product is accessible on any browser-enabled device so that anyone with a phone, tablet, or computer can use it. This approachability is instrumental for increasing our conversions to customers.
6. We focus on an alignment of business and customer goals so that we are always on the same team. Instead of using paid training as a revenue stream, we put our effort into simplifying the user experience and improving education to reduce our support costs. Instead of hiring an expensive sales team, we focus our resources on making our product a collaborative tool so that professionals will share it with each other organically.

Ultimately, our low price is made possible through efficiency and optimization with the smart use of tech. Disruption is happening all around us: email replaced traditional post and revolutionized how we communicate, Netflix has replaced Blockbuster and changed the way we watch, and Amazon has made shopping faster, simpler, and cheaper. Technology is making better services available at lower prices than we ever imagined, and we are bringing that efficiency to real estate. Using Assess+RE, real estate professionals can now underwrite deals in under 30 minutes without breaking the bank. The future of financial modeling is here, and it is bright.

This is the first in a series of articles about cloud-based real estate platforms and why innovation through tech is great for our industry. The world is changing quickly, but we are here to help you keep up.

If you enjoyed this article and are interested in checking out Assess, sign up for a free account. We are always in the customer support channel, so reach out with feedback, questions, or just to say hello!