Commercial real estate remains a favorite with investors. According to CBRE’s 2025 U.S. Investor Intentions Survey, 97% of respondents said they plan to maintain or increase buying activity in 2025 compared to 2024. As a result, commercial real estate investment firms can expect to do greater volumes of business this year.
Many real estate investment firms, especially the smaller ones, use antiquated methods to conduct their business. Manual processes and the use of spreadsheets to monitor and control capital raising and investor reporting are common. Even at larger firms, older systems or partially automated workflows are still commonly used for tasks like document signing, reporting, or compliance tracking.
The good news is that technology offers a smarter, more efficient alternative. Investment firms still relying on outdated processes can improve efficiency, reduce errors, and unlock a range of benefits by switching from spreadsheets and manual methods to a modern CRE investor dashboard.
This article will describe some of the advantages that a technology-driven approach can offer real estate investment firms.
Capital Raising
Securing funding lies at the heart of a CRE investment firm’s operations. Companies that can handle this aspect of the business well establish a solid foundation for their success. A CRE investor dashboard can play a key role in helping firms streamline and improve their capital raising processes:
Lead and Prospect Management
The dashboard helps track investor interest in a manner that focuses on prospects who are more likely to invest. Additionally, the software platform can categorize potential investors by type. For example, it could group prospects under individual investors, family offices, and institutions. This makes follow-up activities far more efficient.
Online Subscriptions
After an investor has decided to commit funds, there is a need to enter into documentation, complete KYC (Know Your Customer) formalities, and organize onboarding. The investor dashboard can help complete these activities quickly and seamlessly online.
Processing of Capital Contributions
Dashboards often facilitate tracking and managing capital contributions via check, wire, or ACH, with some platforms offering integrations to streamline the payment process itself.
Investor Reports
Keeping investors informed with regular reports regarding how their investments are faring is essential. It is also necessary to communicate promptly about one-off events. For example, investors should be informed about how their funds have been deployed and the progress made in meeting the stated objectives of the investment. Carrying out these activities manually and tracking progress on spreadsheets is cumbersome as well as error-prone.
An investor dashboard automates the communication process, ensuring that the appropriate message is sent to each intended recipient. Among the many reports dashboards can generate, the most commonly used include:
- Performance Reports: The dashboard can be used to send quarterly and annual reports that provide details about property performance, NOI (Net Operating Income), occupancy, expense particulars, and IRR (Internal Rate of Return).
- Investor-level Summaries: These provide a concise overview of all the investments that a particular investor has made with the firm.
- Tax Reports: Tax documents like K-1s can be securely distributed through the dashboard, ensuring timely and encrypted delivery to investors.
Distributions
Making distributions is one of the most critical areas of a CRE investment firm’s operations. Investor dashboards are purpose-built to streamline this process efficiently. The software can make automated distribution calculations that consider the investor’s ownership percentage and the deal structure. It can also help in the following ways:
- Handle Different Types of Distributions: Real estate investment dashboards can support multiple distribution types, including recurring payouts, one-time distributions, and return of capital.
- Send Automated Notifications: The dashboard has the capability of sending emails and portal alerts to investors when distributions are made.
- Make Electronic Payments: The dashboard eliminates the need for manual processing by enabling ACH and wire transfers. This simplifies the workflow and reduces the chance of errors.
- Automatically Update Investor Records: Each time a distribution is processed, the software updates investors’ accounts, ensuring records remain accurate and current.
Compliance and Security
Spreadsheets come with several critical limitations. First, they can be accessed by unauthorized persons. Second, it is difficult to establish an audit trail when using spreadsheets. And third, the data stored on them is not encrypted. A CRE investor dashboard addresses all these issues while also providing a range of additional features that enhance compliance, efficiency, and security.
Let us look at the specific ways in which a CRE investor dashboard is a far better choice than a spreadsheet in terms of meeting compliance and security requirements.
- Real estate investment dashboards include features that help in complying with SEC requirements, anti-money laundering rules, and KYC regulations.
- Dashboards ensure that investors receive reports, updates, and other communications via encrypted portals instead of emails.
- Investment firms can set view and edit approval permissions, thereby preventing unauthorized staff and third parties from accessing data.
- The better dashboards are periodically updated and subjected to security audits. This ensures they continue to meet regulatory requirements and remain safe from hackers and malicious actors.
Scalability
As the scale of operations of the investment firm increases, spreadsheets simply cannot handle the increased volume and complexity of data. A CRE investor dashboard, on the other hand, can consolidate investor, property, and financial data into one platform. Consequently, there is no need to maintain multiple repositories of data, a practice that would involve periodic reconciliation as well as extensive manual effort.
There is another area in which a dashboard has a clear advantage over a spreadsheet. A dashboard can be used to send personalized reports and messages to thousands of investors. Using spreadsheets for this task would be cumbersome and prone to errors.
The ability of a dashboard to effortlessly handle large datasets is of critical importance as it simplifies the process of making capital calls and distributions. Carrying out the same task using spreadsheets is impractical.
The Bottom Line
Investment firms that stick with outdated manual processes involving paper records and spreadsheets are putting themselves at a disadvantage. Switching to a CRE investor dashboard can boost efficiency, streamline capital raising, and simplify the handling of large data volumes. Investment firms that have not made the transition yet would be well-advised to do so as early as possible.