Tampa Bay area resident Dean Scarlett has worked in the real estate sector for about a decade. As a broker, he understands the challenges of the industry firsthand.
Earlier this year, Scarlett launched the DLAnalyzer platform. The artificial intelligence-empowered tool helps investors evaluate properties based on six pillars: cash flow, capital stock, market, asset fit, execution and risk.
Last month, Scarlett announced an over $1 million round for the initiative.
“My parents were first generation immigrants,” he explained. “They came to this country with basically nothing. They never had any high paying positions or jobs or anything like that. Yet, over the course of their careers and my life, I was able to watch them go from relative poverty into the comfortable middle class entirely through real estate investment.”
However, his family faced barriers in the industry. This inspired Scarlett to create something to make commercial real estate “more attainable for people who might have had a hard time engaging with it in the past.”
The Driven Life Academy was the first step. Scarlett and his team have developed a full curriculum and work with investors. Participants are able to engage in weekly group calls, one on one coaching sessions, in-person training and networking events.
DLAnalyzer was the next piece of the puzzle. It has been in the works for quite some time.
“There are a ton of different integrations,” he said. “The main crux of it is an assessment function. So, it operates as an extremely powerful underwriting tool as well as a negotiation and networking tool.”
The key goal is to help investors determine if a property is a good fit for their portfolio. Scarlett explained that individuals not only need to find the right deals, but also the “support in order to be able to make that deal profitable” and funding sources.
“As far as finding the right deal, one of the primary ways that we decided to build that out was in partnership with real estate agencies,” he said. “So, we connect with brokerages and have them supply strong deals that the tool can then assess against an investor’s profile and then raise those as recommendations to the investor.”
This creates a more personalized experience in comparison to emails and other marketing efforts, Scarlett added. Investors know that the deal is “100% matched” to their capital stack, experience, capability and time.
To receive an evaluation, individuals can upload an offering memorandum into the platform.
He said that DLAnalyzer was designed to help “experienced investors do more and better.” Additionally, it was created to “lower that bar for people who might not have even considered commercial real estate as an opportunity in the past.” This can bring new capital in the industry, Scarlett believes.
AI plays a key role in the background assessment. It is utilized for “initial parses for data.” Additionally, customers can use the technology as a “negotiation assistant.” This allows them to ask “what if” questions such as “what if this changed?”
“I don’t think you can escape from AI,” Scarlett said. “So, the primary thing is how can we take these new tools and then leverage them to accelerate existing businesses and build out new ones in the future?”