Watch: Inside ACRE’s Investor-Centric, Tech-Enabled Approach to Development.

Precision with timeliness, complemented by visibility, doesn’t often occur in the Construction and Real Estate (CRE) world. To achieve surgical levels of precision during the planning and execution phases of development, a lot of time is required for proper data collection, verification, dissemination, consolidation, and interpretation just to discern necessary action. Unfortunately,  this doesn’t grant development teams a lot of flexibility or speed to deliver repeatable results. 

The bottom line: the process to achieve these desired levels of precision is cumbersome and often leads to additional delays and costs with little guarantee of scalable consistency. . 

Fortunately, OnsiteIQ’s customers have forged a path in the market to solve these prevalent, industry-led issues by redefining best practices to documenting and monitoring construction with our advanced, AI-driven technology. This is why we’re so excited to showcase the first of a series of customer-led videos that demonstrate the “OnsiteIQ Advantage.” 

We interviewed Les Menkes, Founder and Managing Partner, and Brian Smith, Director of Construction at ACRE Management, to hear how they leverage years of capital management experience, culture, and the appetite for transparency to lead with an investor-centric mindset, leveraging advanced technology to simplify the real estate development process.

Founded by former Wall Street executive Les, who spent 25 years at Morgan Stanley before co-founding ACRE in 2011, the firm has seen tremendous growth. Today, ACRE operates across the United States and Asia, offering equity, development, and credit opportunities to a global investor base. ACRE‘s cautious approach to investment and commitment to safeguarding investor capital has played a crucial role in its success. Over 14 years, the team has carefully balanced scaling operations with risk management, ensuring that investor interests remain at the forefront.

Real estate development inevitably involves risks related to budget, scheduling, and site conditions. Les emphasizes that managing these risks early on, with decisive actions, is key. Multi-family development risks are not only financial but also operational, as issues often arise due to misaligned parties in the development chain. ACRE has grown faster than the average real estate platform by embedding technology into daily processes and maintaining a strong, investor-centered culture.

What sets ACRE apart is its unwavering focus on being a fiduciary for its investors. ACRE offers a diversified investment platform that spans equity and credit opportunities, with investor protection as its top priority. By carefully selecting multi-family development projects based on market demographics and feasibility, ACRE works to deliver the best possible returns for its investors.

Brian believes that their strong collaborative culture and the team’s sound foundation is the driving force behind the success of their developments in the multi-family space. The team’s easy access to transparent information and open communication fortify results and ultimately align with the company’s vision and goals.

The use of OnsiteIQ’s platform—delivering consistent and accurate documentation and progress of construction with contextualized analytics that leverages the underwritten completion date for each project—helps ACRE improve how they deliver on their fiduciary responsibility to investors. Virtual access to real-time progress across their regionally diverse portfolio gives managers and construction teams 100% transparency and confidence that they’re leveraging the data they need when they need it to respond to today’s fast-paced market. As a result, ACRE is able to improve their predictability in budget and delivery regardless of location, ultimately securing trust with the multi-family investor community at large.

Despite the volatility of the real estate development and investment market, the future looks very bright for ACRE, as they continue to explore new property types and expand into additional regions. This degree of flexibility is only possible because of their balanced approach to risk management, leveraging advanced technology, and facilitating an open culture that distinctly differentiates their ability to address the complexities of real estate development.

If you want to learn how to achieve similar results on your development portfolio of multi-family assets, reach out to us today.