Client Benefits
Cut to the chase
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The Juniper Square fund administration team supports different capital events for Avananth’s open-end fund, including preparing quarterly audited financial statements, investor statements, and waterfall calculations, as well as managing distributions and investor portal updates.
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With Juniper Square’s integrated system, Avanath's key stakeholders—from finance and investor relations to individual LPs—have broken free from data silos and can trust they’re working with up-to-date information kept accurate by expert accountants and automated workflows.
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As the firm’s fund administrator and partner in technology, Juniper Square helps Avanath efficiently store, manage, and access critical data across fundraising, investor management, and fund administration, all within a single source of truth.
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Properties
108
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Cities
53
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AUM
$4B+
The Client: Meet Avanath Capital Management
Avanath is an investment firm that acquires, owns, renovates, and operates affordable, workforce, and value-oriented apartment communities across the U.S. As many of these markets are underserved by institutional capital, Avanath can acquire apartment assets in these sectors and deliver risk-adjusted returns through current income and long-term capital appreciation to their investors. Their mission also focuses on providing tenants with higher-quality, well-maintained, and safe housing by investing in on-site services, amenities, and activities that add value to properties and bring residents’ desired lifestyles within reach.
The Challenge: Too Few Administrators Center Technology
Avanath often finds itself at the cutting edge of innovation, investing the time and money to build a technical infrastructure that supports everything from tenant leasing to work orders and in-house fund accounting to corporate accounts.
While they initially managed fund administration activities in-house, once they launched a large open-end fund, Avanath’s leadership recognized the need for a third-party fund administrator who not only understood the intricacies of that fund structure but also valued technology as much as they did. “When you have the same values, it's much easier to work as partners, whether that be your auditor, fund administrator, or tax accountants,” said Chief Financial Officer Wesley Wilson.
The Goal: Find a Partner, Not Just a Service Provider
It was imperative to Matt Gifford, Director of Fund Accounting, that their future administrator have experience managing open-ended funds and know how to navigate any complications that Avanath had yet to encounter. “We wanted a partner that we could bounce ideas off of, someone that we could ask questions to and who would have answers to instead of just delegating tasks and duties.” Given the ever-evolving private markets, Gifford added that he wanted to work with an administrator who stayed on top of current trends and had a superior technology product.
In addition to experience with open-end funds and a shared commitment to technology, which “will never replace human capital, but will enhance and bring benefit beyond what human capital can bring,” Wilson was adamant that potential third-party administrators be able to demonstrate their ability to attract and retain talent, adding, “The longer the tenure of their employees, the more consistent your service delivery model.”
You will always need human capital, but technology brings accuracy. It brings efficiency. It brings transparency. It changes how people can interact with the data they're providing.
Wesley Wilson
CFO
Avanath
The Outcome: Greater Access and More Control
Before Juniper Square, many day-to-day activities were manual. Gifford and his team would create notices in Word, convert them to PDFs, and then upload individual files to the investor portal—not a process that could easily scale with the new open-end fund. “Now it's an import of data into Juniper Square, a click of a button, and PDFs, notices, and emails are all created.” Thanks to Juniper Square, Avanath can quickly and accurately create account statements and distribute them to investor groups and their associated advisors.
In addition to supporting Avanth’s team, Juniper Square has directly impacted the firm’s investors. “When technology is effectively paired with fund administration, it benefits the institutional LP base, giving them real-time access to information that they need,” said Wilson.
While the initial partnership was strictly for fund administration, getting access to Juniper Square’s administration technology convinced Avanath to move its fundraising and investor relations operations to Juniper Square—integrating the investor CRM, data rooms, investor portal, and reporting tools in a single, unified platform. The firm has gotten many compliments about the overall LP experience from its fund investors.
Juniper Square’s integrated platform has also proved a boon for data governance across the organization. “The Juniper Square platform allows our accounting team, our fundraising team, and our C-suite to see the same investor data,” added Gifford. “Before, it was a constant back-and-forth, asking for different reports from different groups. Juniper Square helps eliminate some of the risk of human error in moving data around. Having one easy-to-use platform to view all this data makes our lives much easier.”
“Juniper Square gives a level of transparency and control that allows me to push the firm forward,” concluded Wilson.
