Commercial finance brokerage Stamford Capital has launched a new platform that allows borrowers to compare interest rates across the market.
The tool, known as comr8, will enable customers to access proprietary IP from Stamford that can guide them through the lender market and help them to discern the best option for them.
“It’s a tool and a marketplace,” said Mike Hynes, joint managing director at Stamford. “What we’ve done is leverage the IP that sits within Stamford Capital as a commercial mortgage originator.”
“The comr8 tool allows customers to quickly search, access and sanity check their financing as it relates to commercial real estate assets, whether investment or development. It’s a quick, look-up reference tool that then allows the customer to engage with Stamford and progress a financing enquiry through to an application and then a close.”
“We’re a broker, and that’s our business. It’s a tool that’s more for our customers than for other brokers: we point them to it if they want to check financing.”
Stamford claims to have the richest data set in the marketplace and is essentially handing that over to customers to use to their advantage.
“There’s value in our IP,” said Hynes. “Customers use us as a specialist commercial real estate asset debt originator, and probably the largest in the country given that we’ll do $2 billion in origination this year.”
“The tool automates and accelerates the process of a customer understanding broadly the financing that might be available for their asset. The commercial financing market is quite nuanced, considerably more than the residential mortgage application, because customers have varied drivers and demands.”
“It’s not all about leverage, it’s not always about pricing and it’s not always about presales, it’s not always about recourse. It could be any one of those factors or it could be any combination of them and perhaps some more, that influence the need.
“It’s a starter. It’s not necessarily the solution. In the course of our discussions with clients, we share that IP in any case. Our role is to inform customers around what the best product is for them in the market.”
“That might be a banking solution or a non-bank solution, whether it makes sense to leverage one project relative to other ones: that’s our value piece. We’d share that IP in the regular course of business, so it’s just an online tool that lets customers access it more quickly.”
“But the nature of the commercial financing world still does require that human interface when it comes to execution.”
