Missed our recent webinar? Here’s what you need to know.
Real assets firms are under pressure to do more with less — fewer fee layers, tighter execution, and investors demanding better returns across the full investment life cycle. Last week, we brought together a panel of Intapp leaders and industry experts to explore how a purpose-built operating system can address those demands head-on.
If you weren’t able to join us, here’s a summary of the five key themes we covered.
1. Vertical integration is reshaping how real assets firms compete
The webinar opened with a clear-eyed look at a structural shift already underway: real estate investors are moving beyond traditional fund management into full-service, operator-led platforms. The goal is to move capital and work seamlessly — from fundraising and deal sourcing through development, leasing, asset management, and exit.
The most successful vertically integrated REITs have demonstrated what this can mean in practice: roughly 50–150 basis points in expense savings, 5–10% NOI uplift, and 100–300 basis points of total shareholder return outperformance. For development-focused firms, improvements in development IRR of 300–600 basis points are achievable.
But the benefits of vertical integration don’t materialize automatically. Without connected systems, the model can create more friction — more handoffs, fragmented data, and limited visibility at the property level. The firms that win are the ones that control the workflow end to end.
2. Connected workflow is the foundation – not a feature
A recurring theme across the session was that technology is no longer a back-office cost center for real assets firms. It’s the operating backbone that enables efficient execution and turns property-level data into a compounding performance advantage.
The webinar made the case for why generic tech stacks fall short. When acquisitions teams, development teams, and asset managers work across disconnected systems, critical context gets lost at every handoff. Business plans crafted at underwriting don’t survive to disposition intact. IRR protection requires continuity of data across the entire life cycle.
A purpose-built platform designed around connected workflow — where every deal, asset, and decision is tied to a physical location and a single source of truth — changes the equation entirely.
3. Intapp Properties puts the physical asset at the center of everything
A live product walkthrough of Intapp Properties showed what property-centric workflow looks like in practice. The platform is built around a core principle: every deal, every data point, and every workflow is anchored to a physical location — the parcel, the lat/long, the tax ID.
From an integrated GIS mapping interface that surfaces FEMA flood data, demographics, parcel ownership, and lending history in a single view, to a bidirectional Excel integration that eliminates manual data transposition, to a dynamic project management suite purpose-built for real estate transactions — the demonstration covered the full acquisition life cycle.
A few capabilities that stood out:
- Pipeline visualization — fully configurable deal tracking with auto-populated demographic data, inline editing, and support for portfolio deals made up of multiple underlying assets.
- Excel integration — a patented, bidirectional connection between the cloud platform and the models your team already uses. Publish from Excel to update the system in seconds; pull data from the system to populate your model just as fast. Every change is time-stamped with metadata so teams can see exactly how assumptions evolved.
- Asset management and financial ingestion — direct integrations with Yardi, MRI, RealPage, and other systems of record normalize disparate financial data automatically, enabling real-time pro forma vs. actuals variance analysis without manual transformation.
- Document generation — IC memos and other templated documents in Word or PowerPoint format, generated directly from deal data, so teams spend less time formatting and more time deciding.
4. AI is only as good as the data foundation underneath it
The webinar’s AI segment made a point that too many firms are still learning the hard way: deploying AI agents on top of fragmented, ungoverned data doesn’t solve the problem — it amplifies it.
Intapp Celeste, our agentic AI platform, is built on a fundamentally different architecture. Rather than plugging a generic chat interface into dozens of disconnected data sources, Celeste unifies data across the firm, applies a semantic context layer to route queries correctly, and governs access at both the user and agent level.
The distinction matters. A generic AI tool asked to “add this deal to my pipeline” must traverse dozens of connectors, identify the right object, find the correct tool, and navigate required fields and business logic — all without the firm-specific context to do it reliably or efficiently. Celeste handles that plumbing natively, because it’s built for this industry and embedded in the same platform where the work happens.
Governance isn’t an afterthought here. Intapp has spent over 20 years building compliance infrastructure for professional firms in highly regulated industries. The same rigor that governs user permissions in Intapp Walls now extends to the agents themselves.
5. Skills and playbooks turn AI infrastructure into operating leverage
The final section of the webinar moved from architecture to application — showing what it looks like to deploy agentic workflows inside a real assets firm.
Celeste introduces two key concepts:
- Skills are deterministic, repeatable workflows. Think of them as the codified version of what your best analysts do every day. An example from the demo: when an offering memorandum lands in the system, a skill automatically extracts key data points, compares them against pipeline criteria, scores deal fit, and creates a deal record — without anyone lifting a finger. Another skill compared IC memo projections against actual financial performance pulled from Snowflake, producing a variance analysis on demand.
- Playbooks chain multiple skills together into more complex, multi-step workflows. A market research playbook demonstrated during the session mined internal deal history, queried external data sources like Preqin, ran web searches, and produced a comprehensive multifamily market report — automatically, on a recurring schedule. Playbooks also have memory: when a user flags that a result doesn’t match how the firm thinks about a deal, the system remembers that feedback and refines its outputs over time.
The framing from the session is worth repeating: the goal isn’t to deploy a rent roll abstractor or an OM reader. It’s to install an agentic infrastructure across the entire firm — one that lets you build an unlimited number of skills and agents, governed, context-aware, and grounded in your own data.
Want to see it for yourself?
If this summary raises questions about how Intapp’s platform could work for your firm, we’d love to continue the conversation. Reach out to our team to schedule a personalized walkthrough of Intapp Properties and Intapp Celeste.
