Conducting any sale or lease of real estate can be a time-consuming and inefficient process, including numerous back-and-forth emails, messy document-version control and often a breakdown in communications. Now, ICSC’s members receive a free subscription to Propdocs, as well as access to ICSC’s Shopping Center Study Lease and clause library, which otherwise is available to ICSC members for $24.99 and to non-ICSC members for $34.99. Included with the Propdocs subscription is a powerful suite of tools tailored to enhance efficiency in managing their transactions.
Learn more and sign up here, and register for April 9 webinar for ICSC members here. You can email info@propdocs.com with any questions.
Propdocs founder and CEO Steven Jaffe discussed how Propdocs was developed, its key benefits to ICSC members and the role of artificial intelligence in the future. See that conversation below.
Propdocs founder and CEO Steven Jaffe
Tell us about your background.
While my education was in engineering, I’ve spent the last 20 years investing in and building technology companies across several industries. In 2017, I took over Spacelist and rebuilt it into the leading commercial real estate listing site in Canada. Over 25,000 real estate professionals, hundreds of thousands of businesses, as well as dozens of Canadian government bodies rely on Spacelist for up-to-date, accurate commercial real estate listings. With Spacelist we were able to identify and solve problems faced by this industry by implementing technology to streamline the process and improve users’ experiences. My business partner in Propdocs and Spacelist is also a CRE veteran, investing in and owning a portfolio of CRE properties in the U.S. and Canada. The leadership team at Propdocs is comprised of industry experts in CRE and B2B technology, as well as enterprise product and software development.
Why did you build Propdocs?
After scaling Spacelist, we identified several other problems the industry was facing and we decided to invest in spinning out a separate company to solve the one that we felt would make the biggest impact. Across the industry, the majority of CRE transactions are on the smaller side but are very inefficient. To be clear, nothing is currently broken, but there is a huge opportunity to streamline the process by leveraging technology to provide a consistent and trusted experience — for all parties. One of the specific gaps in the market is the distribution, access and use of standard contracts. Whether it’s specific to a company, an association or a governing body/board, there is no single system of record to work out of like there are for residential transactions.
Describe the journey in getting to where Propdocs is today.
Propdocs went to market in late 2021, while the market was still figuring out how to get out of the pandemic, and it was a top priority to implement technology to improve the efficiency of collaborating remotely. At the end of 2022, based on a lot of customer feedback and market research, a massive opportunity presented itself that we chose to capitalize on. CRE organizations and associations were searching for a better solution to distribute and access their libraries of standard contracts. Their members were also looking to utilize those standard contracts in a single end-to-end solution. Enter Propdocs. At the beginning of 2023, we started to focus on ways to provide a service to these organizations as a way to extend a new member benefit to get more value from the organizations’ document libraries they already had available. These relationships allows us to have a direct line of feedback with our target users and build market-specific features that solve problems these organizations present to us that their members are experiencing.
How do you incorporate feedback from these organizations and users to keep improving your business?
Propdocs has a constant feedback loop between them and our product and customer-success teams. This allows us to quickly iterate and optimize the experience to offer the most value to these organizations and their members. For example, we leverage access to the organizations’ internal leadership committees through focus groups to gain critical insight into current pain points and opportunities to improve and/or build new features to solve their problems. We will often take new prototype concepts to these groups to get feedback and improve the product before it is even released. This allows us to bring the best product to market that is tailored specifically for our users in CRE.
What are the details of your free subscription for ICSC members?
We’re offering ICSC members a free subscription to Propdocs, as well as access to ICSC’s Shopping Center Study Lease and clause library [which otherwise is available for purchase]. This invaluable resource streamlines the leasing process, offering standardized, industry-specific clauses that align seamlessly with ICSC best practices. Included with their Propdocs subscription is a powerful suite of tools tailored to enhance efficiency in managing their transactions. Propdocs’ platform, with its user-friendly interface and robust features, further empowers ICSC members to streamline their workflow, centralize information and make data-driven decisions.
What are some key Propdocs features to which ICSC members have access?
ICSC members will be able to manage their teams, track all deals and associated documents and ensure everything runs smoothly, all from one central platform. Trust and transparency are critical for deal success, and automating and structuring a robust audit trail and document-version history saves time and helps improve relationships between parties with a smoother transaction. While it’s easy to lose trust in a deal, it’s exceptionally hard to gain it back.
The feature users spend the most time with is our document-management system, which includes the ability to draft, edit, redline, version and e-sign documents. Designed specifically for commercial real estate transactions, whether drafting from a template, or starting from scratch, everything is streamlined to make the process as straightforward as possible.
Collaboration is another key aspect we’ve focused on. Our platform enables members to work together not just with their teams but also with external parties. This means quicker negotiations and faster agreement finalizations, all thanks to features like track changes and version control that keep everyone aligned.
While e-signing is nothing new, of course, our integrated e-signature capability means documents can be signed directly within the platform, eliminating the hassle of using separate tools for this crucial step. The reality is a document is scrutinized the most right before it is sent for signatures, and having the ability to review and suggest edits in the same place you send for signatures saves a lot of time and reduces the headaches of having to void a signing package to make changes.
What is next on Propdoc’s product road map?
As you might have guessed, AI is a big part of our future, as it should be for everyone in our opinion. At the end of 2022, I personally invested in an amazing company called Docugami, founded by former Microsoft executives, which focuses on structuring data in documents to apply generative AI. We’re excited to build and integrate technologies like Docugami to allow our users to query their documents in a conversational format, allowing for quick and easy insights into their deals from lookups like commencement dates to advanced recommendations on options for counteroffers. Our overall AI strategy is focused on offering tools to allow for quicker and more reliable access to information, trends and ultimately actionable data to make smarter decisions.
What are your long-term goals with this offering?
We see this as a chance to not just grow Propdocs but to lead the way to improve commercial real estate with technology. It’s about more than just reaching more people; it’s about digging deep into what the industry needs and how we can innovate to meet those needs. We’re excited to get insights that help us make our platform even better, adding new features that real estate pros really need. But it’s not just about the tech. We’re also looking to build strong relationships within the industry. This gives us a unique opportunity to connect with key players, share knowledge and work together on making the whole real estate process smoother and more efficient.
Read more at https://www.propdocs.com/icsc.