Is there a Black Wall Street rebirth being conceived? More and more black-owned businesses continuing to enter into fintech and real estate tech.
LaSalle Investments has partnered with RealBlocks to distribute and trade their investments to potential investors. With this partnership, the Black-owned company hopes to best balance growth opportunities for people of color and promote the understanding of real estate investment.
It’s been reported that RealBlocks will work with LaSalle to digitize their fund management process, including $77 billion worth of their assets under management.
RealBlocks is a platform that will help bring in new investors, provide technology for secondary trading, and process subscriptions for retail and institutional funds. RealBlocks is not the manager of the assets or making investment decisions for LaSalle. They simply provide back-office software solutions to their global business.
“RealBlocks is a game-changer in the real estate and alternatives space due to its ability to deliver an all-encompassing strategy that addresses the entire lifecycle of the investment process,” Jodi Akers, managing director at LaSalle, said in a statement. “Partnering with RealBlocks to bring their technology solution to our private equity business to optimize our global investor onboarding aligns with our digital transformation goals of continuing to improve our client experience and enhancing our operational efficiency.”
Black entrepreneurs and business owners tend to have a more inclusive outlook on business that focuses on serving historically underserved communities.
RealBlocks has just completed the transaction of their largest sale to date. In an interview with Realtor.com, RealBlocks CEO Perrin Quarshie discusses some of the features of his platform.
“While alternatives have traditionally been limited by high barriers to entry such as geographic limitations, high minimums, and illiquidity, we set out to address these issues by building a better alternative for our clients,” he says. “We do that by providing the industry’s first white-label platform that allows for turnkey online global distribution and straight-through processing with all of the needed functionality for sales, feeder funds, and fund administration.”
A partnership that will help more retail investors come out on top.
Although Quarshie was not at liberty to disclose how much revenue his firm generates, he said, “RealBlocks has helped LaSalle create new products for retail investors, the first of which has raised over nine figures in the last month for LaSalle.” LaSalle will have to pay an undisclosed fee that corresponds to the lifetime of their assets. They are paying it to RealBlocks in return for a bulk purchase. To further enhance RealBlock’s activities, they have recently acquired LaSalle, which will help them in their strategic growth.
Quarshie has said that the LaSalle partnership will bring new revenue to RealBlocks, validate its technology solution for large asset managers, and sets it up to expand among other large asset managers.
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Quarshie also states that RealBlocks is one of the first companies to deliver blockchain solutions to modern-day financial institutions. “The momentum from the deal will enable further growth for the organization as we look to scale our business to more fund managers,” he says.
But the deal wasn’t easy. Quarshie says it took two years to convince LaSalle. During the bidding process, they were introduced to RealBlocks through contacts on their advisory board. He says that RealBlocks differed itself from its competitors by offering technology that delivers clients cost efficiency and access to a broader audience.
Quarshie says RealBlocks is a registered broker-dealer with FINRA and a member of this industry’s trade groups, such as the Institute for Portfolio Alternatives and the Defined Contribution Real Estate Council.
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