The Challenge
Active in 28 states and with a $3 billion portfolio, including 4,000 hotel keys, Lightstone is one of the largest and most diversified privately held real estate companies in the US. As a REIT, Lightstone uses third-party managers to run their construction projects. Marc Dober, Vice President of Asset Management for Lightstone’s hospitality sector, is responsible for overseeing project managers from outsourced companies.
Marc’s number one goal is to ensure that Lightstone has a great product, which means constant capital projects and large property improvement plans (PIPs) across the entire portfolio. This calls for top-of-the-line communication, processes, and data to stay up-to-date and in control of budgets, timelines, and potential issues. However, managing third-party teams across numerous hotel properties was creating added challenges for Dober—access to real-time, day-to-day insights into project status was minimal, and the Excel sheets his managers used were laborious, error-prone, and caused version-control issues.
The Solution
In 2016, Dober heard about Procore through a third-party project manager. He was eager to look into Procore as he wanted a way to better understand his projects in real time and more easily and accurately report to the board and the SEC. When Dober saw the ease of use of the platform, he was excited to bring Procore to Lightstone. Dober expected that implementing an entirely new system across their third-party management companies, general contractors, and internal teams would take a huge amount of time and resources. Instead, he received immediate visibility into all of the resources and information he needed on a project and full buy-in from his stakeholders. His third-party managers and vendors loved using the platform, and general contractors were particularly relieved to get away from complex bid sheets in Excel.
“The ROI we see is significant, as the software makes my job and those of my managers a lot easier. Using Procore frees me up from shuffling too many Excel documents—and gives me time to focus on revenue creation for each of the assets.”
Marc Dober
Vp of Asset Management, Hospitality
The Results
Standardizing and centralizing the processes of third-party managers has helped Dober guarantee that Lightstone delivers the best hotels for its investors. In the past, Lightstone had to have faith that management companies were tracking projects properly, but now Lightstone mandates project tracking through Procore, giving them drastically improved visibility into their projects. The added transparency and control over their projects has saved Dober from hiring an additional 3 or 4 people to manage projects, analysis, and capital planning. Looking to the future, Dober is enthusiastic about the growing database of historical cost and vendor data Lightstone is developing within Procore, as every detail of their projects run through the platform in a consistent way. The ownership and transparency of data helps Lightstone drive costs down through data-driven decision making.
