Agora improves investor experience for OpenPath Investments

About OpenPath Investments‍

OpenPath Investments is a real estate investment firm headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company was founded in 2005 with the goal of using real estate development to address social and environmental challenges.

‍OpenPath has successfully grown its portfolio to consist of properties in nine states, and it has a team of roughly 160 people across the country.

OpenPath primarily invests in multifamily residential properties, such as apartments and condos. Since its inception, OpenPath has focused on investing in properties that restore dignity to the communities they inhabit.

‍The issues OpenPath faced with other platforms

According to Mike S. , Managing Partner at OpenPath, they have tried other investment management platforms in the past, but couldn’t find a platform that truly streamlined their workflows: ‍

“Our experience with other alternatives was that they were clunky and complicated to use, and onboarding new team members was particularly difficult”

Swilling also adds that “support was limited and often quite expensive, so we couldn’t easily get the help we needed.”

Because other platforms weren’t intuitive, OpenPath lost time while operating at substandard efficiency.

Sorting and organizing investments in their previous platform was cumbersome and caused time management issues. Investors had a hard time accessing information, communicating, and receiving reports. ‍

OpenPath needed a platform that could streamline and simplify back-end operations and create a better, more accessible experience for investors.

How Agora created operational efficiency for OpenPath

One of the primary reasons OpenPath switched to Agora is that the platform was designed by real estate experts, not just software designers. The same goes for customer support.

With Agora, the OpenPath team saw an improvement in everything from user experience to customer service.

Swilling notes, “Unlike previous alternatives — where we were dealing with generalist technologists or generalist customer support agents — we find Agora to have a very in-depth understanding of our business. They are able to be real partners in how we set up the platform and structure our data. They speak our language.”

That ease of set-up and onboarding made a significant difference for OpenPath. They had close to two decades’ worth of data, and the Agora team helped them to thoroughly audit and clean up the data to facilitate a fast and painless migration to the Agora platform. Even with customizations, they were able to go live on the site in under 14 days.

Additionally, Agora’s customer support was there to lend expert guidance at every step of the way. Swilling explains:

“The customer support that Agora has provided has been phenomenal. It’s 24/7, and the support professionals are always very kind, patient, and generous with our team. Plus, the extensive support structure is bundled with the monthly fee, so it was much more affordable than our previous provider.”

Time savings and happier investors

Kirsti Gapter, Executive Assistant and Investor Relations at OpenPath, mentioned how Agora’s easy-to-use platform benefits both OpenPath users and their investors. “Agora’s platform is way more user-friendly than what we were used to. Internally, the process of running reports and filtering data is so much easier now. We save roughly 25 hours per week on operational processes.”

On their investor experience, she added, “Agora has really simplified a lot of the data and made it more usable for our investors. They are able to find all their data and reports a lot easier, and that efficiency has definitely played a huge role in our firm meeting and exceeding investor expectations.”

Closing Thoughts

OpenPath was looking for an investment management platform that could bolster its stewardship-based investment approach. In Agora, they found a company that could help them achieve their goals of creating a positive social impact with real estate investments.

Swilling views Agora as a long-term partner as their firm grows: “We expect Agora to be a significant part of our growth because of its ability to provide a very high quality of data to our investors — both in data integrity, but also in the increasingly customizable reporting that Agora is able to deliver — all of which translates into happier and more satisfied investors, which really is the lifeblood of our business.”