UK Councils recently invested well in excess of £6 billion per annum and there are no signs of this activity stopping. We are delighted that Avison Young’s trialling of Dashflow highlights a new use case in this space: City Council teams do not commonly spend vast amounts on traditional enterprise software like Argus Enterprise or MRI Software, yet they need to demonstrate proper due diligence on behalf of tax payers with readily available software like Microsoft Excel for Desktops.
Avison Young realised Local Authorities commonly handle real estate investment scenarios in Excel thanks to its transparency (also see “mathematical proof” now required by RICS Surveyors in recent 2022 report). Dashflow’s automatically-built template models for Excel (aka the “DashModels”) allow advisors to share instantly a new, safely-checked financial model with the client.
The above enables a City Council contact to easily review, edit and amend assumptions like any professional template model user at the likes of elite-paying institutions such as Deutsche Bank. This relates directly to our DNA at Intellect Automation: to democratise cash flows and bring transparency and creativity to the investment workplace.
Top real estate Capital Markets professionals also know they need to quickly and efficiently present their investment scenarios and ideas to Clients – who themselves are under increasing pressures to ‘run numbers’ involving greater modelling complexity to explain more scenarios and potential volatility in the market. Getting an instantly-built supporting cash flow model sent from an iPad or smart device to a desktop saves precious deal time when sharing ideas with proactive originators. It’s a win-win in terms of time and speculative expense – for both the advisor and their clients.
Advisors can even text and Whatsapp an Executive Investment Summary Preview or send across the safely-checked institutional-grade DashModels to Local Authority fund managers and Assistant Analysts. This means clients do not have to wait for initial analytics to see safely modelled IRRs, annual cash coupons, equity multiples, etc – or indeed wait to allocate speculative work to an internal analyst who has to juggle the usual diaries and existing workloads.
There is ongoing public work at a Parliamentary level to ensure City Council real estate investments are properly monitored. While there is likely to be more regulation, this investment activity will continue in various forms. John Knight at Carter Jonas has a helpful run through of the issues in this Local Authority related investment sector (click here).
Join a demo to discover more about this use case. And get in touch to learn how safely-checked DashModels can also apply downward pressure on your businesses’ professional indemnity cover cost.
