Q&A: Matt Berlin, Paragon Real Estate Investments

Yardi Investment Accounting is the only one-stop shop I’ve seen in the market.

– Matt Berlin, Chief Financial Officer –

We recently caught up with Matt Berlin, CFO for Paragon Real Estate Investments, for perspective on the drivers and results of implementing new accounting software for managing real estate investments.

Matt, what is Paragon’s business focus?

We’re a privately held company that manages and invests funds on behalf of family offices, institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals. We manage our growing portfolio of stabilized assets through our flagship fund, Paragon Real Estate Fund. The Paragon team is based in La Jolla, Calif., and owns commercial property in key urban markets nationwide.

What challenges did you face in your real estate investment operations?

As our investor base grew significantly, we found that doing property accounting manually on spreadsheets was cumbersome, time-consuming and mistake-prone. That prompted us to seek a new software solution capable of streamlining journal entries, general ledger updates, distributions and other investment operations.

Then you adopted Yardi Investment Accounting. What did that do for you?

It automated our asset, investment accounting and investment lifecycle within a single connected solution. Yardi Investment Accounting is the only one-stop shop I’ve seen in the market.

What results have you seen from the implementation?

The solution produces faster reporting, helps us formulate our investment strategies, satisfies investors and enables full transparency from investors through assets. Its seamless integration with Yardi Voyager means we don’t have to worry about mistakes from manually entering data into spreadsheets or whether disparate systems can communicate with each other and make the various general ledgers match.

Investment Accounting also streamlined our annual net asset value calculations by automatically incorporating the current share price.

Can you cite an example of Investment Accounting’s utility?

When we executed a capital call, we didn’t need to set up new spreadsheet formatting. We no longer needed to open multiple spreadsheets. Investment Accounting gave us one place to find the information we needed.

What does the future look like for Paragon? 

Transparency in investment accounting and general ledger operations under one platform is a huge element of our growth plans. When an investor wants to assign one entity to several new entities due to, for example, a change in family structure, we can quickly split that out and be done with it.

By automating all distribution transactions, statements and other operations, Yardi Investment Accounting helped Paragon grow its high-net-worth investment base by 50% without adding staff. Automated manual spreadsheet data transfers save multiple days monthly.