SpaceQuant Gets a Renewal With JLL

Mortgage automation and decision system SpaceQuant announced that it renewed its partnership with CRE giant JLL for the fourth time.  Although the specifics sound more like a client renewal, it’s still an important development not only for the company but the product category itself.

“The renewed agreement enables JLL to leverage SpaceQuant’s automation technology for processing and analyzing financial performance of real estate assets underlying the $131 billion loan portfolio serviced by JLL,” the company’s press release stated. “In addition to expanding the share of the portfolio processed by SpaceQuant, the renewal agreement enables JLL to use SpaceQuant API connectivity to export data directly from SpaceQuant to JLL’s servicing system — bypassing the usual tedious step of copy-pasting data from exported excel [sic] files.”

It sounds like a vendor-client relationship rather than a partnership as the delivery of value, outside of presumed licensing fees, moves in one direction. But that aside, the importance is clear. JLL is massive and its choice in an AI-powered mortgage automation platform is a significant vote of confidence.

“SpaceQuant’s capability to extract, standardize, and analyze data from property financials, combined with automated reconciliations and analyses, has already transformed our operations,” Fernando Salazar, director of asset management at JLL, said in prepared remarks. “Instead of the 30-40 minutes it took us previously to process a single financial statement, it now takes 1-3 minutes with the SpaceQuant automation. The addition of the export API further automates and speeds up our processes.”

In contracts, the phrase “time is of the essence” means that timely completion of responsibilities is critical. Missing a deadline can raise the potential that one of the contract’s parties is in material breach, which might allow cancellation.

Although there is nothing in some overarching CRE industry document that uses the phrase, in a practical sense, time is always of the essence. The longer it takes to process a loan, the greater a chance that a deal might fall through. The ability of software to sift through massive amounts of data and pull up information that might be critical to a decision means those who use it can get a speed advantage over competitors.

The number of examples is growing. Reigo Investments, a global investment firm based in Israel, working with Cantor Fitzgerald, uses AI to help build loan pools for securitization. AI screening can in theory identify high-risk renters. Software using AI can open the door to pricing transparency and undercut asymmetric information advantages that once belonged only to brokers.

There is unlikely to be a single AI vendor winner in any given area of CRE operations. Instead, the issue will become which firms gain advantages over others from the technology.