Luc Bricaud, Head of Fund Management at Altixia REIM, shared with us the issues at stake in his profession and his experience with MYRE. MYRE has taken up the challenge of simplifying real estate fund management and of providing reliable data with the help of a simple, collaborative and adaptable tool.
Can you introduce Altixia REIM to us and describe the work you do?
Altixia REIM is a fund management company approved by the AMF, the French stock market regulator, to manage pooled investment vehicles, Real Estate Investment Trusts (SCPI) and Collective property investment schemes (OPCI). Altixia is a young company, as we began investing for pooled funds in late 2018. Our “youth” is an asset since we were determined to stand out from the rest. In particular, Altixia REIM is the most digitally oriented B to B management company on the market today. Agility, transparency and providing guidance to customers are also our watchwords in making the real estate sector as accessible as possible to our end clients.
My job: I am in charge of Fund Management at Altixia REIM. My goal is to guarantee the best performance for the funds we manage, in line with the specific strategy of each fund.
The Fund Manager acts as an interface between the available resources, originating from collection or bank funding, sets out the real estate investment policy and chooses the real estate assets best adapted to our SCPI and OPCI products through investment committees.
Almost from the start, and with "small" assets to manage, this system showed its limitations, with scattered, unreconciled data, and lengthy processing time for analysis or reporting.
What issues did you face before working with MYRE?
Right from the start, we made full use of digital technology for the "client" aspects, that is, all the tools allowing us to streamline the collection of capital from our intermediated customer base with CGP (Consultants in Wealth Management). But we had no effective tool for managing real estate assets, apart from Excel! Managing and consolidating real estate data for budget purposes was shared between an aging software solution used for invoicing tenants, the accounting tool, and spreadsheets. Almost from the start, and with "small" assets to manage, this system showed its limitations, with scattered, unreconciled data, and lengthy processing time for analysis or reporting.
Why did you choose MYRE and how does our solution meet your needs?
The "traditional" publishers of software dedicated to the real estate sector developed tools around features dedicated to Property Management in a broad sense, and often focused on production software. We were looking for a solution that was lighter to implement and maintain, but which would allow us to organize the data and the documents we needed to manage real estate assets.
So we were looking for a software solution like Altixia: recent and agile in its design! We wanted to find a tool that could be shared and used by all our co-workers . Not only the asset management team but also by the salespeople in the field, who present our products and our assets to our asset-manager partners, by the accounts team, which can, for example, see the details of new leases, and of course, by the Management, which has access in real time to the main asset management indicators.
We were looking for a solution that was lighter to implement in order to properly organize the data and documents essential to the management of real estate fund and a tool that could be used by all our employees.
The architecture, adapted to accessing data with a web browser, smartphone or tablet, the highly advanced modeling possibilities provided by the tool, and MYRE's “native” focus on KPIs convinced us to adopt the MYRE solution.
How did you implement the solution and how do your teams use it?
Rollout was made easier due to three factors. First, our portfolio was recent, and we had practically no problem in accessing archives. We then allocated a small, in-house project team to enter data on buildings and leases. Implementation was also made easier thanks to MYRE's Customer Success Manager, Fabienne. She gave answers in real time to our questions about getting started with the software and helped us with certain very specific technical points in some of our commercial leases. In the end, we implemented the tool after a single training session lasting less than one day!
MYRE meets the vital need for organizing and analyzing real estate data, while still being very simple and user-friendly. MYRE is an adaptable tool and the company's teams have always been on hand to meet our needs.
Getting started and using the software was very natural for the asset-management team, which acted to "promote" MYRE in the company. It still needs to be developed among the sales teams so that MYRE can become a comprehensive presentation tool for the portfolios of our Real Estate Investment Trusts (SCPI) and Collective Real Estate Investments (OPCI).
Did you encounter any issues and how did the MYRE team help with them?
Some features of the MYRE tool were not totally adapted to the SCPI and OPCI sectors, which involve very specific constraints and calculation methods. The gaps in the feature list were identified well ahead of time, and MYRE told us they wanted to provide us with support in adapting their app.
We are currently contributing to the development of features that will be used to interface invoicing data from tenants with our accounting software. This was not a "native" function of MYRE, but it will mean we can keep the software as a central reference for Altixia's real estate data. The MYRE teams have taken on board our requests for adapting and developing the solution.
What are the benefits of integrating MYRE?
The data are far more reliable and fully logged, which was an initial aim that has now been achieved. The possibilities provided by the software in terms of indicators and analyses are currently being developed, since some adaptations to SCPI and OPCI still need to be delivered. So we are far from making use of the tool's full potential!
Would you recommend MYRE?
Yes, absolutely! MYRE meets the vital need for organizing and analyzing real estate data, while still being very simple and user-friendly. MYRE is an adaptable tool and the company's teams have always been on hand to meet our needs.
