Agora Review

Agora Overview

Agora moves investor management out of outdated Excel spreadsheets and into a modern, end-to-end digital platform where users can manage assets, relationships, reporting, documents, and more from one dashboard while leveraging the power of automation.

With Agora’s comprehensive real estate investment management platform, companies seeking to raise and preserve capital can provide their investors with the best real estate investment experience while also improving their professional image.

The best part? Agora saves companies valuable time while maintaining and improving their ability to raise capital, manage investor relations, manage active investments, and handle financial administration.

Pros Explained

User-friendly, comprehensive, customizable solution: The Agora platform offers all the tools a real estate company needs to manage its investors. Companies can market and fundraise for any investment type, manage commitments and capital, calculate and pay distributions, create and send investor reports, manage investor relationships, and more all in one platform. Almost everything can be customized for a company’s specific needs.

Top-notch investor portal: Agora’s customizable portal gives investors complete visibility into their investments, including financials, reports, and real-time updates. The beautifully designed, easy-to-use Investor Portal also improves optics compared to sending unwieldy spreadsheets to investors via email. Custom report builders allow users to take care of all their investor reporting, streamlining operations. Agora also offers other financial services, like tax preparation and bookkeeping.

Waterfall calculator: Calculating investor distributions can be time-consuming and tedious. Agora’s waterfall tool makes these calculations quick and easy. The tool can support even complex splits while showing exactly how calculations were made.

All types of investments: While many investment management platforms focus more on syndications, Agora can support all investments, including open-end funds, closed-end funds, syndications, and other unique situations. Open-end fund support is particularly attractive, as open-end funds can be more complex to manage.

Cons Explained

Short company track record: Agora was founded in 2019, so it’s still in its growth phase. In 2022, it raised $20M in a Series A round by Insight Partners, which has helped the startup grow substantially and innovate. The Agora platform helps real estate firms globally manage over 70K investors and $150B AUM across every single asset class.

Steep learning curve: Since Agora allows companies to customize almost anything, users may find their initial onboarding overwhelming. Fortunately, Agora’s dedicated customer service can promptly ensure smooth onboarding. The platform may be difficult to manage at the outset, but having a dedicated account rep to assist you at every step of the way is invaluable.

Agora Product Offerings

Agora offers comprehensive tools and services to assist real estate companies with fundraising and investment management. Some of Agora’s key features include:

Investor portal

Agora’s Investor Portal is an advanced, user-friendly platform that enhances how real estate companies interact with their investors. 

The dashboard centralizes all vital investment information in a single view, allowing investors to see a real-time overview of their entire portfolio in a visually appealing card-style layout with clear titles and tags for easy navigation. This dashboard is also customizable, meaning companies can present data tailored to the needs of individuals or groups of investors and can offer visuals like charts and graphs to communicate investment details effectively.

Investors can delve deeper into any investment, accessing all related updates, metrics, graphs, transactions, and documents. The dashboard also facilitates new investments with a Live Offering module that leads investors to data rooms or directly into the subscription process. 

Investor CRM

Agora’s CRM is a tool for real estate firms to manage investor relationships efficiently. It simplifies the entire investor lifecycle, from prospecting to deal closure and ongoing management. The CRM offers smart filtering, automation rules, dynamic lists, and advanced searching, enabling a comprehensive and clear view of investor data.

With features allowing for bulk actions and one-click operations, the CRM makes sharing reports, distributing documents, and mass communications easy. It also logs and tracks all investor comms., ensuring everything runs smoothly.

Fundraising platform

Agora’s fundraising tools allow companies to market deals, manage prospects, and quickly facilitate the subscription process. Their solution provides a centralized offering page that displays all prospects and their statuses within the fundraising cycle, eliminating the need for external tracking methods like clunky spreadsheets. Customizable columns allow users to prioritize and access the most relevant data quickly.

Agora even adapts to various investor types, from individuals to family offices and institutional investors, offering tailored subscription processes and collaborative review capabilities. This ensures that high-net-worth individuals, family offices acting on behalf of clients, and institutional investors with multiple stakeholders can all navigate the fundraising process effectively and make more informed decisions.

Agora’s fundraising software integrates seamlessly with core functionalities such as the Investor Portal, CRM, reporting tools, and document management systems, creating a cohesive fundraising ecosystem.

Distribution automation

Agora’s financial automation allows companies to calculate and execute distributions straight to investor bank accounts. Firms can transfer distributions with quick ACH processing and track everything in their dashboard. Agora can handle capital transactions, maintain investor cap tables, automate complex waterfall calculations, and facilitate real-time investor reporting within a single platform. 

Investor reporting

Agora’s investor reporting system is designed to keep investors up-to-date 24/7 with customizable templates and automated processes for generating and delivering various reports. The platform includes features to create quarterly, annual, and periodic reports, statements, and more. Agora’s reporting function also automates K-1 distributions, a historically time-consuming process.

Document management

Agora’s document management system is tailored specifically for real estate investments, offering a streamlined way to organize, access, and manage documents. It allows users to store and categorize various offering docs and financials, providing easy retrieval through advanced search and filtering options and ensuring secure document delivery. The system also features smart bulk uploads, saving time during tax season by automatically assigning K-1s and other tax forms to investors.

Tax services

For an additional charge, Agora offers K-1 tax preparation. Agora ensures accurate and efficient tax filings by partnering with selected CPA firms specializing in real estate. Investment managers benefit from a dedicated CPA to handle communications and document management directly within Agora’s platform. This service simplifies the process by directly sending K-1s to investors at a significantly reduced cost compared to traditional CPA firms.

Bookkeeping

In addition to accounting assistance for tax season, Agora identified a need for quality bookkeepers to track finances throughout the year. For an additional charge, Agora’s bookkeeping service provides clients with an in-house team that can handle all necessary functions, such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and account reconciliation.

User Experience

Agora’s user interface is clean and visually appealing. While new users may experience a steeper learning curve as they customize the software to meet their needs, the Agora support team is always available to help. However, Agora’s offerings make it as intuitive and straightforward as possible for users to get the most out of the software. 

From an investor perspective, Agora is also intuitive and user-friendly. Investors can easily view their various investments, documents and reports, and distribution history while communicating directly with the real estate company in one easy-to-use portal.

Customer Support

Agora offers multiple ways to connect with its customer support team, including dedicated onboarding specialists, customer success managers, and other account reps, as well as an automated site chatbot. 

Users can also get support by emailing [email protected] directly. Subscribers also receive dedicated customer success reps who help ensure a seamless onboarding process and are always available to answer questions.

Pricing

Agora offers a tiered pricing structure based on a firm’s Equity Under Management (EUM). Pricing starts at $749/month, which includes full access to key features such as the Investor Portal and reporting, CRM, fundraising tools, document management, and distribution/accounting tools. 

For an additional charge, subscribers can have Agora’s CPAs handle their K-1 preparation from start to finish and use Agora’s team of bookkeepers to manage a company’s financial records.

Competitors

Juniper Square

Juniper Square is one of the biggest real estate investment management platforms on the market today. Juniper Square is specifically designed for real estate investment managers to help streamline fundraising, investor reporting, and investment management processes. Juniper Square is used by a wide range of real estate firms, including private equity firms, developers, and fund managers.

Unlike Juniper Square, Agora is solely focused on real estate. Juniper Square targets private markets, including venture capital, private equity, and real estate. Agora was created specifically for real estate firms.

InvestNext

InvestNext is a real estate investment management software company focused on serving syndicators and users who are growing small firms. It provides a holistic approach to managing real estate investments. Their platform offers solutions for raising capital, managing waterfall distributions, and securing investor commitments.

Compared to InvestNext, Agora is much more customizable. InvestNext is suitable for smaller, emerging firms but may lack the features and customizations that scaling firms require. Agora has also provided tax and bookkeeping services for over 3 years, while this is a newer feature for InvestNext. Finally, all Agora subscribers receive a dedicated customer service manager, while only enterprise InvestNext clients receive one.

Appfolio Investment Manager

As one-half of the Appfolio property software suite alongside Appfolio Property Manager, AppFolio Investment Management is a cloud-based software platform designed to help investment managers streamline their operations and manage their portfolios more efficiently. It offers portfolio tracking, performance reporting, client communication tools, and compliance monitoring. 

Compared to Appfolio, Agora is much more user-friendly and intuitive. Appfolio mainly focuses on its property management software, so its investment management software and features aren’t as robust, and no new features are planned. Additionally, Agora subscribers are given a dedicated customer service manager for support, while Appfolio relies on a ticketing system.

SyndicationPro

SyndicationPro is a real estate syndication software company specifically focused on the needs of real estate syndication companies. The software helps sponsors raise capital and manage assets and includes a CRM, investor portal, fundraising automation, and ACH payments. 

Unlike SyndicationPro, Agora supports all investment vehicles, including funds, while SyndicationPro has a more limited scope. Agora’s Tax and Bookkeeping services are also more robust.

How We Evaluated Agora

When evaluating Agora, we looked at several factors, including:

• Product offerings: We looked into the depth and breadth of data provided on Agora, including what offerings set it apart from competitors.
• Pros and Cons: We weighed what potential customers should look for against the features that would make them stand out among competitors.
• Ease of Use/Functionality: We tested how user-friendly and intuitive the Agora platform is and how quickly a new user could understand its functionality. 
• Customer Support: We evaluated Agora’s support network for response time, training materials, and accessibility to customer service reps. 
• Pricing and transparency: We examined how Agora’s products are priced and how readily available pricing information can be found.

Summary of Agora Review

Many real estate companies constantly seek new ways to stay lean and automate operations as much as possible. For many companies, investment management tasks are tracked in siloed Excel spreadsheets, making fundraising, investor management, distributions, and reporting a time-consuming headache. 

Agora aims to be a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for real estate investment managers, helping to streamline operations, cut costs, and focus on their core activities of building relationships and closing deals. 

With a clean interface and professional-looking investor portal, Agora is an excellent choice for companies looking for an all-in-one investment management tool. The depth of software solutions and customizable features included in the subscription plan is a key benefit.

A fully integrated and fully customizable investment management solution like Agora is critical to running a successful real estate company. By adopting Agora’s platform, real estate investment firms can enhance their professional image and deliver an exceptional investment experience to every investor. 

Disclaimer

This page may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase or investment through these links, CRE Daily LLC may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. These recommendations are based on our direct experience with these companies and are suggested for their usefulness and effectiveness. We advise only purchasing products that you believe will assist in reaching your business objectives and investment goals. Nothing in this message should be regarded as investment advice, either on behalf of a particular security or regarding an overall investment strategy, a recommendation, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of or an offer to buy any security. Advice from a securities professional is strongly advised, and we recommend that you consult with a financial advisor, attorney, accountant, and any other professional who can help you understand and assess the risks associated with any real estate investment. For any questions or assistance, feel free to contact [email protected]. We’re here to help!