What do you like best about Agora Real Estate?
What we find most beneficial about Agora Real Estate is that it enables our clients to clearly visualize their investments with us and easily access the documents related to the funds they invest in.
The development team also continues to improve existing features and build new ones that are useful for both our company and our clients.
Agora’s data organization aligns well with the structure our company already uses for investor base control, which helps speed up our processes when uploading information. We also want to highlight how useful the option to import data in xlsx is, since other platforms either don’t offer this option or only accept CSV imports, which can be more time-consuming.
In addition, we have a Customer Success Manager who is available when we need support and who has helped us throughout onboarding as well as during our ongoing usage.
Because our company is focused on Real Estate Investing, the tool is especially useful for us. We can upload metrics and information related to the assets, and the fund offering tool and smart questionnaire are also very impressive. They help speed up the fund subscription process, particularly for funds with simpler documents to complete and sign. When uploading a collection of documents, the automation tool is also very helpful because we can upload documents in bulk and the platform identifies which client each document is related to.
Overall, our company is very satisfied with the custom investment platform service we are able to offer our investors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Agora Real Estate?
Agora Real Estate is a product focused on certain types of funds and investment strategies. Unfortunately, we can’t submit all of our funds to the platform because some of them have a structure that differs from the types of funds that are best suited to Agora. The funds that are not a good fit are generally those with a broader investor base—mainly publicly traded funds—which also makes it harder to keep track of all fund investors. We understand this limitation, and it doesn’t bother us, because the platform works very well for funds with a smaller investor base and fewer transfers between investors.
Regarding onboarding, since our company had a lot of data related to positions, transfers, capital calls, and distributions, the data import process was a bit slower than we expected, and we needed to make corrections after the import. That said, the Agora team stayed in constant contact with us throughout the process, and the final result was very good.
At the moment, the platform is going through an “internationalization” effort, meaning improvements to make it easier for investors and investment managers outside the USA to use. One barrier our clients currently report is language, which is a common area for improvement in many software products. Agora is implementing a Portuguese version of the platform, which will be very useful for our Brazilian clients.
Another related barrier is currency. Right now, the platform shows clients a combined sum of their positions in USD and BRL. Ideally, both we and our clients would be able to view positions separated by currency and, if desired, have the option to convert using the daily exchange rate into their preferred currency.
We also really like that the platform allows us to submit and update the real estate portfolios of our funds. The main issue we currently face with this feature is the map functionality: it’s difficult to use because the building address has to be entered in a very specific way for the Google Maps link to work. A better approach might be to allow users to paste a link from Google Maps directly, or to provide an option to use coordinates.
Agora Real Estate is not a cheap product. However, our company believes the investment is worth it for the kind of customized investment platform service we are offering to our investors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.