CASE STUDY

Real Estate Finance Business Scales to $2bn

A real estate finance team used Jinx to help grow to over $2bn.

A small team of experts used Excel spreadsheets and VBA to run a real estate loan business. In order to scale, it became apparent that managing so much data and complex business logic in Excel presented a significant operational risk.

We were growing the business quickly and managing everything in Excel was no longer practical. The risk of inconsistent modelling between sheets, and the amount of work to maintain each sheet was too great. With Jinx we were able to achieve a faster turn around time on pricing new deals in Excel with the confidence that our code and data was being securely managed. Investment Director

No two real estate loan deals are alike, and any application that could be developed would always be playing catch up to the business requirements. So, it was decided that analysis and underwriting of new loans would remain in Excel but using bespoke loan modelling software to be developed by an internal technology team.

Reacting to changing business needs quickly is key to our success. Every deal is different and the flexibility to pull in an analyse data quickly in Excel, while relying on a solid foundation of bespoke modelling tools gives us a competitive advantage over our peers. Head of Real Estate Execution

A sophisticated real estate loan model was developed in Java, backed by a SQL Server database. This model could be used for analysis of potential deals, as well as the continued risk management of the portfolio using the same consistent scenario analysis across all executed deals. Using Jinx it was simple to expose the functionality needed to Excel. The business continues to work in an agile way adapting to each new loan deal as necessary, but with the benefit of a consistent set of modelling tools and with all critical data stored in an audited database.

We already had a lot of Java experience in our team, and being able to keep working with Java was a big plus for us. Jinx made it really easy for us to expose our new models to Excel which meant the business could start using them immediately. Quant Developer