Farbman Group is a full-service commercial real estate firm serving clients throughout Michigan and the Midwest. As its investment sales team evaluated hundreds of opportunities each year, producing polished offering memorandums became time consuming.
Farbman Group is a full-service commercial real estate firm serving clients throughout Michigan and the Midwest. As its investment sales team evaluated hundreds of opportunities each year, producing polished offering memorandums and valuation materials became a time-consuming bottleneck. So, they turned to Henry.ai.
Farbman Group provides commercial real estate services spanning brokerage, construction, property management, ownership, and third-party advisory work. Andy Gutman, the firm’s president, has been with the company for more than 30 years and recently sat down with the Henry team to share his thoughts.
The investment sales team completes approximately 30 to 40 transactions annually, but evaluates hundreds of potential deals and prepares broker opinions of value and other materials for many more.
Before Henry, producing an institutional-quality presentation could take between one and two weeks. The team had to gather the information, organize the analysis, build the deck, and ensure that every page followed Farbman Group’s visual standards.
The underlying information was strong, but manually producing each presentation made consistency difficult. Small mistakes involving formatting, colors, or branding could weaken the overall product.
“There’s something to be said for a product that looks polished and strong versus just merely having the facts all right,” Gutman said. “When it looks as good as the information already is, it goes a long way.”
The amount of manual work also limited how quickly the team could evaluate opportunities and respond to clients.
Henry gave Farbman Group a repeatable way to produce offering memorandums, broker opinions of value, and other client-facing presentations with a consistent institutional-quality appearance.
“It’s improved the appearance of our decks and our offering memorandums,” Gutman said. “It’s given us a higher level of continuously institutional-quality decks that we can send out to people.”
Consistency was one of the most immediate benefits. Instead of depending on someone to manually reproduce the correct formatting and branding for every assignment, the team could maintain the same standard across its materials.
“We can duplicate it over and over and over again without having to worry about human error or someone messing up the color scheme,” Gutman explained.
Farbman Group evaluates approximately 150 technology products each year and approaches new software critically. But after the investment sales team tested Henry and demonstrated the difference between its previous materials and Henry’s output, the decision moved quickly.
Gutman shared, “The team came to me and said, ‘This is a must-have.”
The most significant improvement has been speed. According to Gutman, presentations that once required as long as one or two weeks can now be completed in a matter of hours.
“Sometimes it would be a week to two weeks that it would take to get all the information in there and do all the work we needed to create that quality level,” Gutman said. “Now, we could probably do it in a matter of a few hours.”
Gutman estimates that the simpler workflow could allow the team to support as many as five times more deals than it could previously.
The improved materials have also strengthened Farbman Group’s position with clients. Gutman believes their consistent institutional quality has increased confidence among existing clients and helped the firm develop new relationships.
“The fact that our decks now have a consistent institutional quality to them has given many of our clients comfort and helped us find new clients that really trust the quality of product we’re putting out,” he said.
Farbman Group has also valued Henry’s commercial real estate expertise and responsive customer support. Because the Henry team understands the industry, Gutman said it can quickly understand product feedback and requested changes.
For Farbman Group, Henry has become a core part of how the investment sales team produces polished materials, responds to opportunities, and serves clients.
“I wish more platforms were like Henry in how easy it’s been to work with you guys and how good the product is.”
