Lev Eyes Aiding Broker Business With Platform Expansion

Five years after launching as a digital commercial real estate brokerage platform focused on lenders and borrowers, Lev is now targeting brokers in its latest expansion.

Lev is extending its artificial intelligence-driven platform in a strategic move designed to give  brokers the data and tools to improve their daily operations, Commercial Observer has learned.

Yaakov Zar, founder and CEO of Lev, said the move is designed to address day-to-day challenges facing traditional debt brokers, especially time-consuming research and other hurdles often encountered when tracking data for deals. 

“When we initially started the business our plan was to replace brokers exactly, and we thought that we’d build the best software that would allow us to do this,” Zar told CO. “We have evolved in that thinking a lot as we realized that brokers are a very important part of the transaction industry and there’s a segment that will always need them, and that’s why we’re making our software available to them right now.”

Zar said plans were put in motion to extend the platform to brokers in early 2024 after receiving requests from brokers asking for tools that could assist with their day-to-day operations. He noted that, in terms of timing, the move makes sense from a market perspective given that many brokers are now shut out of agency loans, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac placing more scrutiny on broker-involved loans.  

Lev’s expanded platform geared toward brokers “dramatically reduces” lender research times by providing a database of more than 4,000 lending institutions while also leveraging AI to pinpoint lender preferences, according to Zar. The program will also include AI-generated deal books and a feature that quickly provides the most relevant lenders for their specific deal. 

“There is and will always be a segment of the market that just wants someone to handle the transaction for them, whether it’s an especially complex transaction or the sponsor just doesn’t have the sophistication to deal with lenders and negotiate with lenders and they just want to outsource it,” Zar said. “The problems that we solved for sponsors apply to brokers just as much if not more, and we felt like we have gotten to a point in our business where we can bring on this new type of customer.”

Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com