‘Slack for real estate’: the fintech start-up hoping to drive your debt deals

A fintech start-up is aiming to streamline the commercial real estate loans process, allowing European lenders and borrowers to join a new network that will double as a transaction management tool. FinLoop is led by chief executive Thomas Schneider, co-founder of BrickVest, a real estate investment platform bought out of administration by Patrizia early last year. His co-founder on the new venture is Nicole Lux, a former real estate banker who now authors the regular report on real estate lending from The Business School. FinLoop, which has been in beta test mode with selected lenders and borrowers since October, will allow borrowers to target lenders with financing requests, let lenders search for their next customer, and enable both parties to carry out video calls, data room work and document archiving via the software. “We see it as a software solution that brings you from finding the loan all the way to closing,” Lux told EG. “It’s about the back end of it, providing a solution, a management tool, to digitise the whole process.” Schneider hopes the venture solves multiple issues for real estate professionals. “I saw two problems in the market,” he said. “The first and most common is digitalisation in general – lenders need to become more efficient and streamline process. That was the major topic for lenders pre-Covid. “Now an additional problem arises – how do they conduct and grow their business? In the past they wouldn’t really touch their business models because they had record year after record year. Now, thanks to Covid, your business model is massively challenged on originating deals… We’re trying to cover these two problems with one solution.” For borrowers, he added, FinLoop should open up a new world of potential capital sources: “Traditional channels are blocked. In the past if you were a developer and wanted to raise capital you would go to an event or exhibition – none of this is possible anymore.” FinLoop’s transaction management offering should mean users can bid farewell to disparate software set-ups, Schneider said. “I speak to the real estate industry every day. What do they use? They use Salesforce, they use Slack, they use Zoom,” he said. “That’s all great, but [those products] are not made for our industry… We’re trying to provide them with a Slack made for real estate.” The network formed as FinLoop grows, meanwhile, is aimed at broadening users’ horizons when it comes to deals – making it easier for a small developer in Spain, as Schneider said by way of example, to connect with a lender in Germany or the UK. The company is backed by real estate firms including large German institutions – for Schneider and Lux, the goal is that the industry has an interest in helping the product to grow. As Schneider put it: “We wanted to be for the industry, by the industry.” To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@egi.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @estatesgazette