After a 10 year career in IT, Chris Perry III got his start in commercial real estate at the most favorable time possible—January 2008 with ING Investment Management on the debt production team (also known as Lender).
“It turned out to be a favorable because 2008, and 2009, taught me how to be a prudent investor personally and professionally,” said Perry, Co-Founder of LeasePipeline.com.
Since then Perry has remained in the industry to attain an ultimate goal: Successfully marry IT and commercial real estate.
“I enjoy the whole aspect of bricks and mortar,” he said. “Also, I enjoy the fact that I have an opportunity to take what I’ve learned in IT and commercial real estate, and apply it to all owners and operators to make their internal processes more efficient.”
Perry’s least enjoyed the stigma associated with commercial real estate being behind the technology curve.
“Our industry has always understood the importance of implementing new technologies. The moderate progress we’ve seen over the years is attributable to exorbitant customization costs and little relative CRE expertise within the tech companies.”
Enter LeasePipeline.com—where leasing meets technology! The three founders of LeasePipeline, Eric Johnston, Raphael Morozov and Perry, have 15+ years of experience in their respective fields. They began developing LeasePipeline in quarter four of 2009.
“In the early days, it was just a simple deal tracking suite,” Perry noted. “After programmatically capturing nuances and real situations owner/operators experience, we began marketing LPL just three months ago (July 2014). We’ve been extremely well received in the market in just those two months alone we’ve gone under contract with several new clients.”
“Eric’s background is on the institutional ownership side, Perry said. “Ralph’s background is software development and infrastructure, and I have a decade of software development and product management experience, plus seven years on the investments side with large, institutional owners.”
“Historically, most CRE software was developed by teams that only had software backgrounds,” he continued. “With so many nuances of CRE, especially from an owner/operator viewpoint, we firmly believe CRE software teams should have a mix of people who understand technology and the area of CRE they are focusing development efforts around.”
For Perry, it’s hard to choose one person as his biggest mentor, because he has been fortunate enough to have four who were instrumental to both his personal, and professional growth.
“First is Fred Gilkey (Government), who was my first boss in IT, and taught me many professional IT lessons I carry with me today. Second is Jim Todesco, who I met during my IT days with Cox Enterprises. He taught me many strategic business fundamentals that I use today. Greg Michaud is next, who I met in grad school, and hired me for my first CRE position. He taught—and still teaches—me how to prudently underwrite all asset classes of CRE. Finally, Chuck Sullivan, who I recently worked for at IndCor Properties, taught me how to successfully look at CRE assets from an ownership perspective.”
So what’s important to a man who wants to successfully marry IT and CRE? “In order: Helping others (including complete strangers), being open minded to everything (we don’t know everything), my health, and the health of those I care about.”
When Perry isn’t working, he enjoys hanging out with his girlfriend, meditating, cross fit, reading, and programming.
Football season is well underway, and Perry’s team, the Cincinatti Bengals, are off to a great start—they’ve won three games and lost only one!
“This has been tough to say until recently,” he said. “But I’m a lifelong Cincinnati Bengals fan. It’s still tough to talk about the ’89 super bowl (which I’m barely old enough to remember!), but the success of recent seasons have been a warm welcome and a sign of good things to come. WHO DEY!”
