Rockport | A Legacy, A Vision

Eric, it was your idea. Yeah, but I couldn't do it without you. Oh, that's very kind. Eric joined us early on. We were one of the first to look at the use of artificial intelligence to, in fact, extract data from documents. We had an investment in artificial intelligence company. Unfortunately, they were not able to accomplish it. Eric, after a year of attempting to work with them, joined us to make Rockport what it is today. Yeah. I think you had this other product that you were working on that you said, oh, it might have some value, but it's just on the side.

Then we started looking at it more and realized that it was a pretty valuable product that clients needed. It was your whole idea of how do they aggregate all this data? How do they produce all the analysis they need to send it to get ratings? Rockport was a really a glimmer in in in my eye, and you took that from nothing to the product that it is today. As I mentioned, previously, it is about one point five trillion dollars of assets in Rockport today, and that was made by the three of us, but as a team.

You know, Rick and don't tell him I'm saying this. But, you know, was really a visionary ahead of his time that a lot of banks were just using Excel to manage all this data around their commercial real estate, their conduit, that are very old systems and really weren't thinking about this as a value add to them. I was I was the banker that was trying to securitize just using Excel, and it was it was no fun whatsoever. And so, we said there's got tobe a better way.

Yeah. We had one institution that came to us that said, we have a little minor problem. We have positions, we are a first lien lender with prime loans, but we also bought some bonds that are backed by properties. And then we have some risky loans. And the problem is those are in three different departments, each of which have a separate system, and therefore, we do not really know what we own. We know that there are some loans that we turned down as loans that ended up in bonds that we bought as bonds.

Could you help us kind of decipher what we've got? Way back when we first started putting the trip, database together, I received a request from one of the bankers saying, hey. Your bond structures are great; however, those bonds are only as good as the loan's underneath them, and those loans are only as good as the properties, and you have no property information. Could you put some basic real estate information into your bond library? Since we had none, will and Eric put a team together and spent the summer reading through prospectuses and pulling commercial real estate information out of prospectuses and putting them into the database.

And I'm pretty sure at the end of the summer I said, I'm never doing that again. But I think it was a great learning experience because of all that data entry, I think I had an appreciation for building systems after that to make it easier. Because that's really what a lot of our clients were doing was just manually typing in data across the board for their internal data, not just the market data that we were we were working. Very much so.

One of our reasons for being is that we're not, yes, we have, in the person of Eric and his team, tremendous technical knowledge, but we have a general understanding, a, of the market and, b, of the instruments in the market. Therefore, we're much in a much better position to create the products that we've created. Yeah. So only about thirty years out of history together. Yeah. I think not having a political bone in our body when we're discussing what needs to happen with the company, what next challenge do we need to overcome.

Being able to just talk plainly about it and get through topics is a unique experience. Think that's also something we've tried to exude as we've grown and really make this a place where good ideas win and we can really grow. No, it's key. Having done it as long as we've done it, there are many times when you'll have a technical person, a CTO, that has religious beliefs as it relates to what is the appropriate software, and we'll take you down a path based on those beliefs, not necessarily based on what you really want to be using.

And with this relationship that we have, that has never been an issue. We're trying to meet the business needs, like what problems are our clients having, how do they overcome them, not this is the next great flavor of technology that we should use. I think there's a lot of innovation happening that's great but balancing that with the business values has always been our focus. Yeah, as we've talked about, we went from the world of basic type programming to Unix type programming to Windows type programming to Cloud computing, the emergence of AI this round, not what we used twenty years ago.

And that's one of the most difficult things for a company to mature through, to go through different technology over time. It has killed a lot of companies. Well, I think the SaaS model was just emerging. At the time, I think they really called them ASPs, you know, application service providers. But Salesforce was really starting up in that space. And a lot of banks were really skeptical and saying, let's kind of outsource this or move our data outside of the organization. So a lot of it was these internal systems, you know, desktop, applications that either people are filling out or, like we said before, Excel was really kind of the main technology used to manage these, you know, billion-dollar portfolios.

Yeah. It was a bit schizophrenic because you, on one hand, would have some forward-thinking institutions that would say, hey. We expect you to be doing this. On the other hand, the majority of institutions would say, we will not approve that nor touch it. So, you just had to serve, and we had clients in both camps, so you had to be able to serve both camps. Yeah. So I think that was like in the in the early years, you know, this has started as kind of a desktop application that, you know, we had installed in our clients' environments, and then I think what we found over time is that we could innovate and provide a lot more features by bringing it into a place where we're hosting and not having the clients worry about it.

So I think that that was really the initial thought, which is, how do we make this something that we can leverage and grow with a lot of clients and not just do more of the older enterprise model, which was these big systems that get installed and then never get updated. It was really trying to get to, you know, how do we take all the great things that we've built, but kind of see where the market's going, what things we're going to need to support in the future, because the type of business that was happening in those early years was going to change.

I mean, think that's something that you really brought to the table, that this is something that we have to constantly be evolving because if we build software to solve today's problems, by the time it's done and released to the clients, they have a new problem. I think a lot of it is, just breaking down what our assumptions are, and I think that there's nothing that is kind of too sacred to question in the company. Right? If we see that there's maybe something that we've been doing, that there are better ways, you know, getting into that, digging into that, breaking it down versus, you know, I think other organizations may be a little uncomfortable, you know, questioning too much of what's been built because of kind of pride of authorship.

Well, someone did this, so you don't want to kind of go against what they did. And that's one of our axioms, which is intelligent people with these same assumptions will come up with the same results. And so, you must figure out where the assumptions are off, and that takes quite a while sometimes. In kind of the early years, it was very closed environments. Like a lot of these systems were not talking together in either the clients or there weren't enough SaaS systems that did these kinds of specialized areas in commercial real estate.

So I think that, you know, that I think has been the evolution, which is the access to market data, the access to different types of systems that maybe specialize in areas that are not directly commercial real estate finance, but may influence a bank or an institution's decisions or analysis. That interconnected landscape, you have to be able to play in that and to really enable our clients to leverage that. Yeah, those disconnect systems that we talked about earlier required multiple inputs of the same information.

That has been enhanced considerably way back when we first started to form an article that had a pencil every time certain the same data was entered. It was seventeen different times, and this is now way back. Now that today is narrowed way down to only, in many cases, just a couple times. It will be in a few years. Data will go in once. It'll be clean data. It'll be available. You won't be manually entering it, so that it'll be a much more effective and efficient system.

It's getting there. Well, and I think that that's one of the things that we've really had to focus, which is with this sprawl, how do you know your data is accurate? How do you know that kind of the correlations between these things, all these disparate inputs make sense? So, I think that that's been one of the areas that we've had to focus on a lot and that has been our kind of consistent, you know, data, data, data. It's that this is crucially important.

This is what we work with clients, and I think we, you know, we prove that through our, our implementations with clients and the ongoing support we give. And one of our reasons that are in a position in the marketplace as a true alternative for the future is that we live that in the Trepp world, and we lived it in the Rockport world. We've been living it for a lot of years, and hopefully, that experience has allowed us to see ahead. Well, all your success with Trepp was fantastic in terms of all the stuff you learned and, yeah, has helped us maybe cut some edges off.

Yeah. I think we did have to relearn some of the things that you that you were able to kind of prove out over the years. I think that gave us a leg up getting into this space, which is it wasn't like a startup that had no experience with commercial real estate and with the complexities and the problems. I mean, heck, you helped, invent some of the space. You know, it's interesting because you got you got hundreds of new startups that have the AI of the future or have all the technology of the future but have never done a real estate transaction or have any real detailed real estate experience.

It's interesting, we look at it as a future opportunity for us.