Willow Creek Partners

Customer Overview

Willow Creek Partners (WCP) is a Northern Virginia -based private equity firm that executes a broad range of investment strategies, including a robust real estate acquisitions and management division. Their approach is flexible, and they focus on developing insight through research and on the ground experience to craft and execute bespoke investment strategies. 

Challenge

WCPs' existing underwriting process was time-consuming, limited by bandwidth and the need to gather economic and demographic information from multiple sources. With a small team, they needed a more efficient way to underwrite deals and expand their geographical reach to deploy their capital more effectively. 

With just one dedicated acquisitions lead, they were able to fully underwrite about 16 deals a month. Each deal required approximately  8 hours of dedicated time to screen, underwrite, and analyze, or roughly 130-hours total for any deal that went through the full process. . 

The WCP’s teams current operating output was not efficient enough to expand their geographical footprint and maintain deal flow in existing markets without increasing the size of their deal team. Thus, they were actively seeking a cost-effective way to increase their deal coverage. WCP needed to be able to chase deals in new markets, while continuing to go after opportunities in their traditional markets, with the goal of being able to find more opportunities to pursue on behalf of their investors, and ultimately close more deals. 

Solution

Willow Creek Partners engaged Archer in a detailed evaluation process, that included a two-week "Proof of Value" period that enabled their acquisitions team to diligently assess the accuracy of the Archer model with live deals they were looking at. Since Archer has built-in Excel add-ins, the implementation process was swift and painless, allowing the Willow Creek team to stay focused on opportunities.

After working with the Archer team to input their "buy-box" investment criteria into the platform, the team was able to effectively research new markets, source promising deals, and underwrite them immediately, reducing the time required for a full, accurate analysis from a full day to less than two hours.