Case Study: How Colliers Accelerates Deal Velocity
Colliers is a global real estate services firm with 12,300 professionals operating in nearly every country and state. The firm is known for empowering its brokers with entrepreneurial freedom, while providing strong back-office support.
Tom de Jong, Executive Vice President at Colliers, leads a national self-storage brokerage team. In his tenured career, de Jong has sold ~$2 billion in self-storage assets, assisting clients with everything from site selection and selling entitled land all the way up to the sale of fully stabilized assets. Lately, de Jong’s focus has been on how to scale output without increasing operational friction and the wave of new ai-powered tools presented an interesting opportunity to do so.
The Challenge: Bottlenecks in BOV Preparation
For de Jong and team, preparing a Broker Opinion of Value (BOV) was a templated, but still manual and time-consuming process. Each report required pulling in client data, building a unit mix, formatting property details, and working out financials for underwriting. “A single BOV could take a half a day or longer,” explained de Jong. “For a portfolio, it might take 2–3 days. It was a massive time sink especially because even after I was done compiling all the necessary information, I would send that to another team to add polish and final touches, which could take an additional 3-4 days”.
Traditionally an executive like de Jong might hire analysts to handle these tasks, the cyclical nature of the business means that often these hires are inefficient. “At times I have work for 2 analysts, sometimes just one, and sometimes I don’t need an analyst at all,” de Jong noted. ‘I was looking for a solution that could make me more efficient and wouldn’t require any new hires.”
The Solution: Henry.ai
Tom was introduced to Henry.ai and was immediately interested in its promise to automate the BOV creation process. After a demo, he decided to implement the platform. “Everyone’s talking about AI and so I’ve been doing my due diligence on the different tools out there,” said de Jong. “I gave Henry a shot—and I’m super glad I did.”
Now, instead of manually assembling reports and pulling data, Tom uses Henry.ai. He shares the critical details of the asset and the platform automatically generates fully formatted, underwritten BOVs—complete with unit mix, financials, and professional design—within a couple hours.
“What used to take days now takes hours. A full underwriting model and deck that previously took 4+ hours is now just downloading a file and sharing it with Henry” said de Jong.
The Results: Faster, Smarter, More Scalable
With Henry.ai, Colliers has transformed how quickly and efficiently its self-storage brokerage team can operate. The platform has not only delivered time savings, but also improved the quality and consistency of output.
BOV turnaround time reduced from 3–4 days to under 2 hrs
No need to hire additional analysts to handle peak workload
“Henry gives me my time back. That’s the most valuable thing it could do” shared de Jong. “I spend less time on menial tasks, and more time doing what I love – helping people close deals.”
“Henry gives me my time back. That’s the most valuable thing it could do. I spend less time on menial tasks, and more time doing what I love – helping people close deals.”
Tom de Jong, EVP at Colliers
