Commercial real estate technology company RealNex announced that it has formed a Strategic Alliance with Otso offering a new approach to commercial landlord and asset protection through a tenant lease surety bond product. The industry’s first multi-year bond provides enhanced coverage for deal costs such as tenant improvements, commissions and rents while covering every instance of default.
RealNex provides a complete commercial real estate operating system. Driven from a robust commercial real estate centric CRM, agents maintain all their property, market and client information to generate business and manage deals. The Transaction Manager App and virtual deal rooms enable collaborative, online tenant rep, leasing and investment sales services. They can also leverage their data to create authoritative financial analyses and elegant marketing collateral, while promoting offerings to a dynamic, rapidly expanding marketplace.
“Our clients are always striving to find market efficiencies and bridge gaps in transactions. And we are constantly pursuing innovative solutions to better enable them. The Otso solution is a win-win, lowering cost to the tenant and providing more coverage for the landlord, thereby allowing agents to complete better leases,” noted RealNex CEO Jeffrey Finn.
Otso provides an option for landlords to replace traditional deposits with the AM Best A-rated surety bond. Instead of a tenant needing to put up a cash security deposit or letter of credit at the beginning of their lease, Otso makes it possible for them to keep their cash in exchange for a small fee, which is included in the rent. This makes the policy extremely advantageous to tenants as they free capital without additional liability on their books. Otso writes a policy to the landlord which they can hold as collateral for the tenant’s good payment in their lease. Tenants keep their cash at work and landlords receive more coverage, 300% on average, than they would typically receive. In addition, Otso recently launched its Guardian program, providing landlords, asset managers and lenders with real-time risk assessments of all the tenants in their portfolio and immediate alerts if a critical concern arises on any of their tenants.
“Our founding team has been on both sides of the table in lease negotiations and know the pain in trying to balance the high up-front costs landlords maintain relative to the risk of default,” Otso Co-Founder and President Marissa Limsiaco noted. “Ultimately, Otso is the first to help landlords increase the value of their assets by improving their tenant credit ratings, cash coverages and ultimately asset values through our innovative solutions. We are thrilled to be working with RealNex to support their vast client base.”
