Anthony Romano is the CEO of CREtelligent. He holds a business degree in management and economics from Sacramento State University. He views his role as CEO to evangelize the vision, raise & deploy capital, spread the ethos, and set the pace. CREtelligent (Formerly eScreenLogic) is a leading national provider of end-to-end decision analytics and due diligence solutions for the commercial real estate ecosystem.
[00:00] – [03:32] How to Scale Commercial Real Estate with Automated Data Reports
- CREtelligent provides data aggregation and analysis to help companies make informed decisions about property acquisitions and loans.
- Anthony’s company has signed an MSA with McDonald’s, one of the largest real estate owners in the country.
[03:32] – [07:02] CREtelligent Order Management Platform Makes Due Diligence Process Easier
- The company provides automated data reports that provide risk scoring and analysis of disparate data sources.
- The company’s order management workflow platform is easy to use and allows for the collation of disparate data sources into a single report.
- Their Products are designed to improve the buyer’s experience with the institution and reduce the time and cost associated with due diligence.
[07:02] – [10:35] Integrate Into an Online Platform to Help with Transaction Success
- Offers a lot of diligence information alongside overview and cap table
- Provides customer success team to help navigate the deal and manage risk and cost
[10:35] – [13:58] Commercial Real Estate Platform Offers Continuity in Decision Making
- How the company’s commercial real estate platform can be used to help buyers and sellers of small balance properties, as well as banks.
- One feature that the company wishes were on the platform is a decision engine that could ingest policies from different underwriters.
[13:59] – [14:57] Closing Segment
- Reach out to Anthony Romano!
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- Links Below
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Tweetable Quotes:
“There’s a lot of firms out there that are listing and selling commercial properties where we provide a bunch of diligence information that sits alongside the overview and cap table, or cap rates and things of that nature. So before the transaction, we help with site selection, during the transaction, all that diligence.” – Anthony Romano
Connect with Anthony Romano by sending him an email at a.romano@cretelligent.com
Or by visiting their website at http://www.cretelligent.com
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:00] Anthony Romano: On the automated data reports where we’ve got a whole bunch of disparate data and then analytics and algorithms that provide a bunch of risk scoring, that’s the aggregation of data. But we do all of the full sight con sense across the country. We don’t do that with an army of W two employees.
We do that with a panel,
[00:00:28] Sam WIlson: Anthony Romano is the CEO of one of prop techs fastest growing businesses. Cret Anthony, welcome
[00:00:35] Anthony Romano: to the show. Oh, Sam, thanks for having me. A
[00:00:37] Track 1: pleasure
[00:00:37] Sam WIlson: to be here. Absolutely. Anthony, there are three questions I ask every guest who comes from the show in 90 seconds or last, can you tell me where did you start?
Where are you now, and how did you get there?
[00:00:46] Anthony Romano: Sure. Well started in in the residential mortgage in capital market space with a company called Core Logic. Was an executive and a leader there. And went on to a company called First American. You’d think of a big title insurance company, but lots underneath the hood, and watched how the transactions on residential real estate were getting compressed and contracted.
And it was a better experience for borrowers and really wanted to bring that over to the commercial real estate side. So Crit is a firm that’s focused on. Commercial real estate insights, end to end due diligence and asset management. We help literally hundreds of companies reach banks, brokers, insurance companies collapse the cycle time, reduce costs, and improve the experience.
[00:01:22] Sam WIlson: I love the grand vision. I’m really curious as you get into the weeds on this though, What part in, in all cuz I feel like there’s data everywhere, right? What about the data that was out there? Did you look at and say, okay, this is just not organized in a way such that it makes sense for everybody else and I think I can do it
[00:01:39] Anthony Romano: better.
Yeah, I think multiple sort of categories there. So think about site selection. Think about a firm that’s going out and looking at multiple properties in a geography that they’re trying to make a decision on. So we, we’ve signed an MSA not long ago. With McDonald’s, who would tell you?
They’re the largest real estate owner in the country that happens to sell hamburgers. They’ve got, a whole team that goes out and looks at markets and has 10, 12, 15 sites, and they’re trying to narrow it down. We provide a bunch of early insights and pre-screen data reports where we aggregate data from literally dozens of disparate data sets.
We normalize curate data, put it into a report where they can make an intelligent decision. So things like environmental insights, property condition insights, micromarket, demographic insights, climate, carbon footprint, a whole bunch of stuff where you immediately can eliminate a couple properties and kind of narrow down onto one in a kind of pre loi prepurchase environment.
And then when you get into a transaction, now you’re gonna do a loan and you’re gonna buy a property. There are literally 15, 18 different due diligence services and products that are required by banks, insurance companies, owner operators. And normally that process is you pick up the phone, you send an email to dozens of providers, Hey, I need an all the survey.
I need a phase one environmental assessment. I need a flood zone certification and appraisal. We’ve got a technology platform called Radius, that’s an order management platform that allows a user, To put in an address or an APN to immediately identify their property and then to order status, get delivery and archive any product, solution or service we have.
[00:03:10] Sam WIlson: Wow. , that’s absolutely cool. So you were saying that McDonald’s one of the largest real estate owners, like, which, how’d you put it? They’re a real estate owner that sells hamburgers, has come to you guys because you guys have some software and some solutions that even McDonald’s didn’t have.
[00:03:24] Anthony Romano: Yeah, the process, I mean, you’re gonna go and you have a first writer refusal on a, on a property that you know you got 10, 12 days to make a decision on. There’s no way to do full diligence. So early insight, pre-screen data reports, helping that process. A lot of our kind of solutions that have data and analytics where we’ve got a professional over the top interpreting the data.
So think of an environmental professional or certified building inspector and can provide quick information to make a decision. And then again, all of those relatively compulsory services during a transaction. The, the phase one, the property condition assessment, the alta, the zoning if you’re a bank doing lending on any asset class, you’ve got a policy that says to underwrite this loan, I’ve gotta have these services done.
We provide those services, across the country nationwide.
[00:04:10] Sam WIlson: In order to do that you guys have to be pulling data from a lot of different sources, cuz obviously you’re not sitting there , at the site level going, Okay, now there’s this one particular. So would you put yourself in the category of a data aggregator or am I missing something on that front?
I guess? Can you clarify for me? Yeah,
[00:04:27] Anthony Romano: On the automated data reports where we’ve got a whole bunch of disparate data and then analytics and algorithms that provide a bunch of risk scoring, that’s the aggregation of data. But we do all of the full sight con sense across the country. We don’t do that with an army of W two employees.
We do that with a panel, So think of an appraisal management company, right? When I was at CoreLogic, we had a 400 million appraisal management company, 11,000 license usepa Appraisers on the panel. They’re all 10 99. We’ve done that across every due diligence category in commercial. So I think. Valuation, environmental professional surveyors certified building inspectors.
And when we want something done in a location, our panel management platform does all the background check the licensing, the e o, it selects the individual. They use our mobile app and they actually go out and collect photos as subject and adjacent whatever data’s required. It all comes back digitally in our report writing tool.
One of our W2 professionals puts the, report together and off it goes to the.
[00:05:23] Sam WIlson: Wow, that’s that’s really, really fascinating. And you, and you said one of the biggest things that you’ve been able to do is collapse the timeline that it takes to get all of these resources
[00:05:33] Anthony Romano: put together. No doubt. I mean, , if you think about let’s use a bank as an example.
So Celtic Bank is , I think the largest 5 0 4 7 a SBA lender in the country. They’re a big client of ours and they’ve been able to take three and a half of us four days out of their lending process, and they think they can do more. So to the extent, if you’re the bank, , you want to collapse the time so the bar has a better experience.
B, you wanna reduce the cost to the bar cuz many of those products I just mentioned are pass through. Right? They hit the settlement package and the buyer pays for it. So, and then ultimately all that improves the buyer’s experience with the institution.
[00:06:05] Sam WIlson: Wow. That’s, And not only that, but then your people, your banks and people like that are saving money cuz they’re, they’re cutting three or four days of work out of this
[00:06:14] Anthony Romano: process.
Absolutely. Yeah. You’re managing armies and armies of vendors normally, where you’re placing phone calls, sending emails, trying to get everything back. Now you’ve got it all contained in an order management workflow platform. Super easy to use. And,
[00:06:28] Sam WIlson: Yeah, does Credt interface with other softwares and other platforms and I, and I, I can’t even, I probably don’t have the right question for this, so I guess what I’m thinking about is this, is this a one stop shop for everything or is this one part of the puzzle that we need to be thinking about, as it pertains to getting deals done?
[00:06:47] Anthony Romano: I think as it relates to the, what I would just call due diligence, so due diligence before, during, and after a transaction. It’s a commercial real estate storefront in that regard. But to your question, , we integrate via API or, or XML into a loan origination system. We integrate into an online platform.
These there’s a lot of firms out there that are listing and selling commercial properties where we provide a bunch of diligence information that sits alongside the overview and cap table, or cap rates and things of that nature. So before the transaction, we help with site selection, during the transaction, all that diligence.
And then post transaction, whether it’s a bank, a corporation, an insurance company, have got all these assets inside a radius you can manage. From an asset management portfolio perspective, each one of those properties. So on a quarterly cadence, we’ll show you the change in risk profile on that property.
So the change in environmental risk, the change in micromarket demographic risk, the change in climate risk. So these are, you’re trying to arbitrage an opportunity or mitigate a risk. If you’re a bank, you’re sitting with a, an OCC examiner auditor who’s looking at a Cecil stuff, and how do you manage your, your commercial assets.
So it really is end to. Sort of due
[00:07:54] Sam WIlson: diligence that that’s absolutely cool. I mean, what’s it been like building a business like this? I mean, is your background, your background’s not as a tech guy, is it?
[00:08:05] Anthony Romano: I mean, part of it’s tech, it was really, on business operations and, and from but it was all on the residential side.
So if you think about the amount of capital that’s been deployed to help institutions , get transactions done. Faster in residential mortgage. And I would tell you, look, it’s still broke, right? I, I can get a hundred thousand dollars loan for a Tesla an hour and it took me 60 days here in Sacramento to refinance my house at a 30 ltv, no cashout, same lender.
So it’s still broke , on the commercial side. We just saw it was so fragmented, so dislocated. It’ll be evolution, not revolution. These are much more complex and larger transactions. We’ve got a lot of the largest rates in the country that, they’re buying 15, 20, 30 properties at once.
And , we actually, we kinda have a slogan that says high tech when you want it, high touch when you need it. So you can have a frictionless transaction on our technology platform radius. But we’ve got a customer success team that actually becomes part of the deal team of a lot of our. Kind of a closer your white glove service, navigate the deal, help you with bundles, help interpret data and reports and things of that nature.
So it’s, it’s very much what I call tech enabled services. It’s not just a pure software and data company, It’s, it’s a, there’s a lot of humans involved as well.
[00:09:16] Sam WIlson: Yeah, Tell me about the, the, the, the, I guess the process of building this business. How many years ago did you guys start and then, I guess let’s, let’s ask that question first.
Like, how long have you guys been building this?
[00:09:28] Anthony Romano: Yeah. The, the legacy, it was a, we, we rebranded the company to crit in the middle of 2020. And the business started very much in the environmental consulting world. And, and so we had, remediation business, we had. Geotechnical drilling businesses.
I divested a number of those businesses because we really wanted to focus , on the transaction on before, during, and after this transaction. And I think about, there, there are a lot of great firms out there that provide engineering and environmental consulting. And to me it was such a conflict of interest where.
Hey, here’s my phase one. Here’s my proposal for a phase two. Oh, by the way, here’s a proposal for groundwater monitoring and take your tank out. And it was just seemed like it was revenue generating proposal creation that, hey, a football field from the building in 95 feet down, we gotta go check some things out.
We’ll never compromise our integrity and tell you there’s not an issue if there is, but, but we’re not looking, we’re, we’re helping people get transactions done. And manage the risk, and manage the cost of doing that. Is this,
[00:10:21] Sam WIlson: is this a service that you can use on a deal by deal basis?
Where somebody can come and say, Hey, look, I’ve got this, whatever it is, apartment complex, industrial facility, whatevers they’re looking to buy and I need help getting this done. Is that where they can, Is that when they plug into, into your platform or is this something where it’s like, Hey, this is , part of the software suite that you need to have on board and use
[00:10:44] Anthony Romano: in perpetuity and there’s nothing on board.
It’s on cloud based. So I, I send you an email with a username and password. And you log on radius and, and hey, I got a deal. I’m buying a, a storage unit or a multifamily property or a warehouse. And , on that transaction, I’d like to have a couple of these pre-screens to check it out. And then I’d like to order a, phase one environmental assessment and mii appraisal and an all to survey.
And those get ordered and you status where they are, they get delivered right back to the platform. So it’s deal by deal. We have a lot of clients that are doing bulk deals, buying multiple properties at once. We have six of the top 10 specialty insurance firms that are putting, pollution abatement policies and underground tank policies that are using the platform to ton of owner operators.
A lot of. Real estate attorneys, so legal advisory firms that work with corporations. If you go out to a real estate law firm’s website, it looks just like elli. They just don’t do any of it. They tell you, Here’s all the things that have to happen. We partner with them to help them get those pieces done.
A lot would think, think Marcus and Milsap. Kushman and Wakefield. I mean a lot of, lot of brokers are using these, these tools and technologies, helping with listings and helping buyers look at multiple properties. And then of course banks as they’re doing, 8, 10, 12 commercial loans a month, they continually need to order these things to satisfy their policy to underwrite the loan.
Right.
[00:12:00] Sam WIlson: Is there a deal size that where your platform doesn’t make any sets?
[00:12:06] Anthony Romano: That’s such a cool question. I, yeah, cuz I would tell you, when people think of commercial real estate, at least the lay person, and I included myself in that category cuz I was on the Rezi side. You think a downtown, Memphis or Nashville, or San Francisco or New York.
We’re not doing a lot of that. These are, these are retail centers. They’re gas stations, they’re storage units, their, their warehouses. So I think about the vast majority of our transactions are, small balance stuff, two to 5 million, up to a hundred million dollars.
When you’re talking multi billion dollar properties. , that’s a different. Hmm. But those are, one, 2% of the transactions that we don’t play in. Right, right,
[00:12:41] Sam WIlson: right. Yeah, absolutely. No, that, that’s interesting. And so, so if I’m hearing you right, you’re saying that there’s, there’s an upper end where it doesn’t make sense.
Not a lower end necessarily.
[00:12:51] Anthony Romano: Yeah, not a lower end. I mean, we have clients that, a guy or gal is buying a deli, and on that deli, I need to do a couple things to due diligence and can I order these products from you that Absolut.
[00:13:00] Sam WIlson: , that is absolutely awesome. I love it. When you think about your platform, what is, what is one service or feature that you haven’t yet developed that you wish was on there?
[00:13:11] Anthony Romano: Well, when I look at our roadmap we’ve thought through a lot of the vision and where this can go, and most of that comes from feedback from, our clients and, and folks that we’re working with. You think about a bank and they’ve got all the LO’s and all kinds of underwriters, and they, they try to have continuity, consistency where we’re building a decision engine where we can ingest their policy.
So they have a policy based, again, on property, geography, ltv, loan amounts a max code, whatever, the scoring that they get back from our, our prescreens so we can build some bump logic so that across the enterprise there’s, there kind of continuity in how they get deals done.
[00:13:42] Sam WIlson: Got it, got it.
That’s absolutely awesome. I , love what you’re doing. Anthony, tell me this if our listeners wanna learn more about credt you or get in touch with you or a member of your team, what’s the best way to do that?
[00:13:55] Anthony Romano: Yeah, I mean, we are, we’ve made our website really functional. It’s crit.com. They can look at every product, solution and service we have.
They can . Download any. Of our reports and samples and, and things of that nature. My personal email is “a dot romano r om a n o @cretelligent.com”
I love to chat with anybody about what we’re doing and how we can.
[00:14:13] Sam WIlson: That’s awesome. And for those of you who are listening, Cretelligent is spelled c r e intelligent, T E L L I G E N T. So just like it sounds Cret. Anthony, thanks for coming the show today. I’m looking forward to checking out your platform and what it is that you guys do. This has certainly been insightful. Thank you so much. Well, you’re
[00:14:30] Anthony Romano: welcome, Sam. Thanks. Appreciate you.
