Curiosity

Tim Milazzo
January 10, 2020
3
min

You can learn a lot about a person based on what excites them, and what bores them.

We live in the information age. There are more things to watch, listen to, read, play, and explore today than there have ever been before in human existence, and it’s not an argument. A naturally curious person finds something to be excited in. That doesn’t mean that everyone will be excited by learning about real estate deals, but it does mean they have a habit of finding energy exploring something.

Curiosity

noun : a strong feeling of wanting to find out about something

similar : questioning

Curiosity is not quite a uniquely human trait (it did kill the cat after all), but it’s something that is not shared by machines, despite any rumors about AI you may have heard to the contrary. StackSource is, in a sense, building a real estate finance “machine”, but the software itself isn’t curious.

When you send a loan scenario through the StackSource platform, there are some things that happen automatically.

  • You’re instantly matched to lenders based on an algorithm taking the deal information and fitting it to an institution’s lending parameters.
  • A preliminary abstract of the financing request is generated.
  • Our platform pings some data sources that are relevant to the address supplied by the user.

But our web platform doesn’t actually think or care about that deal. It does ask for the user to supply information, but those questions aren’t creative, they are coded in.

That’s still where the people come in. If someone is working on a major real estate development project, there’s an art to understanding and underwriting it. A machine can calculate LTV — it takes a Capital Advisor to determine risk. A machine can accept a “years of experience” number about a sponsor — it takes a Capital Advisor to judge someone’s track record.

Talk to a skilled investor about a real estate deal that they are interested in, and you’ll hear a slew of questions. Have you ever run into someone who wants to know everything about a deal? It seems like they can ask questions for hours about the acquisition strategy for just one property. That’s curiosity.

Stay curious, my friends.

Find the right commercial real estate financing with StackSource by getting instantly matched to the best debt and equity options for your project from our nationwide network of capital sources. 

Our expert Capital Advisors help you secure your ideal capital stack, resulting in a lower cost of capital for your investments in less time and with more transparency than a traditional commercial mortgage brokerage. Learn more at StackSource.com.