FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
Welcome to the Groundbreaker FAQ page! Here you can learn more about our platform and find answers to common questions.
Yes. You can turn this on using a setting in your offerings to require that your LPs submit their W-9s. When enabled, your investors will see the requirement to upload the W-9 after signing your subscription documents in the investment workflow.
Yes. You can give admin accounts to anyone you’d like.
Yes. Accountants can have their own login and may upload K-1s and other documents to share with your LP investors.
Yes, you can structure private debt deals in the platform and send distributions to your lenders. Our distribution feature takes this load off your shoulders and gets you back to doing deals.
Although we do not have direct integration, our document upload feature allows you to easily share any reports created in your property management software directly with your LPs.
While Groundbreaker may be used to handle back office services, we do not operate the portal for you or offer third-party services directly. We can, however, refer you to one of our trusted affiliates.
Yes, and we are proud of it! Our customers have access to chat, email, knowledge base articles, and scheduled calls. Our average email response time is under 15 mins. See more about it in our Customer Commitment.
Groundbreaker does not raise funds or have a pool of investors to send your way. Our software lets real estate deal sponsors raise equity from their own investors under a privately branded portal and guarantees them privacy and security concerning their investors, data, and intellectual property.
Groundbreaker provides you with the tools to publish private placement memorandums on your portal with an easy to use, fill-in-the-blanks, deal publishing tool.
An Offering memorandum, AKA private placement memorandum, is a carefully crafted presentation of your offering. Historically taking shape as a PDF or printed booklet with dozens of pages, it covers details about your offer, your team, investor suitability, and investment terms. It is typically prepared by the GP and their deal team.
This blog post has an in-depth overview of all that goes into creating a private placement memorandum. This blog post on real estate due diligence covers what your deal team might look like.
Yes. All of our customers get a multi-call process for onboarding and instructions tailored for their use cases. Once onboarded, our customers continue to receive proactive support from our customer success team. See more about it in our Customer Commitment.
Subscription agreements are legal documents that govern much of the covenants GPs and LPs have with each other. Although Groundbreaker can provide you with a boiler-plate subscription agreement as a starting point, an attorney should be involved in creating your agreements.
If you need a referral to attorneys specializing in real estate syndication, let us know.
Yes. We give you the tools you need to run your offerings under Title III and Regulation D, which includes 506(c) and 506(b).
Groundbreaker allows you to prompt investors to fill out investor accreditation questionnaires. It also gives you control over the accessibility of your offering so you can choose to make your deals private to specific LP investors or public to approved portal users.
While Groundbreaker does not calculate your waterfall distribution, it supports the ability for you to load your calculated distribution amounts and Groundbreaker can then manage the payment process.
While waterfall calculation is a feature we continue to contemplate, feedback from prospective and current customers shows that most companies want to manage the calculations in-house. At this time, we are focusing our development efforts on continual improvements to the payment process.
There are two ways an investor can get an account with you.
When initiated by your investor: Investors may request access directly from your portal. Depending on your settings, the investor will gain immediate access or his request may require your approval.
When initiated by you, the sponsor: You can create accounts for all of your LPs and send them a portal invitation through an email initiated from Groundbreaker. During the onboarding process, we’ll walk you through how to invite your LP investors. Loading your LPs and their transaction details is also part of our optional data migration service.
Our Customer Relationships Manager centralizes all user information so that you have one place to go to find all your investors (both potential and current). In addition to contact information, you have access to their positions on current deals and the details for their completed investments.
Groundbreaker’s CRM makes it easy to access the data your LPs are asking you for and to determine where they want to invest. You can also use the CRM’s email feature to generate mass or targeted communications to let people know about a new opportunity or keep investors informed about an existing investment.
Our investor portal promotes and enhances your brand at every investor interaction, providing the usability and functionality that investors expect and reflecting the level of professionalism you want to convey.
Groundbreaker determines the distribution amount for each investor based on total cash flow input and investor ownership. Under a straight preferred return, you would simply enter the cash flow minus any fees to calculate the amount for each investor by pro-rata. Under a waterfall structure, you would enter the cash flow minus any fees in addition to the GP and LP split. To see more on how Groundbreaker works with distributions, please watch our investor servicing video.
Groundbreaker is integrated with Hellosign to manage electronic signatures for both investor signature and your countersignature. Fully executed documents are saved and available for download by you and your investors.
As you go through the process of operating a deal and making it a profitable investment for your shareholders, you want to keep them informed. Groundbreaker lets you upload documents and reports to the portal and disseminate them to the investors instantly, easily, and securely.
No need to create individual emails and worry about attaching the wrong document or losing information. Your investors can just log into the portal to see how much capital they have, their ownership of the distributions, relevant reports, and everything that is related to a deal.
Groundbreaker and the Investor Portal make it convenient, easy, and straightforward for the investor. You are providing an elevated experience for your investors with less work on your part. See more about our Deal Rooms.
Summary of technical and administrative security measures:
- Data is encrypted at rest and in transit with bank-grade level security and encryption.
- Data, documents, and other media are encrypted at rest using 256-bit AES encryption.
- Identity Access Management (IAM) tools control access.
- Data is hosted in SOC 1- (also known as SSAE 16), SOC 2-, and SOC 3-compliant data centers operated by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) storage and computing infrastructure. AWS’s data centers have extensive physical and network security measures.
- Strict password policies are enforced.
- Role-based permissions limit access to sensitive data and functions.
- The system is actively monitored to detect issues and outages.
- Two-factor authentication (text message code to verify identity at login) is available.
- Personally Identifiable Information (like SSN) is masked when displayed on the investor portal.
- New versions of Groundbreaker, including security patches and enhancements, are released frequently.
- Employees of Groundbreaker are rigorously screened and vetted.
Your relationship with Groundbreaker is governed by a master contract which includes our terms of use and privacy policy.
The Groundbreaker product team actively manages the product roadmap for each quarter by considering input from multiple sources. These include:
- Monthly Customer Advisory Board meetings
- Customer Support Requests
- Platform Usage Data
- Market Landscape Studies
It’s very quick and easy! To present a deal to potential investors using Groundbreaker:
- Identify the holding entity name with the tax ID information.
- Create an Offering, describing the deal with an overview, documents, videos, and images.
- Set the subscription terms.
- Notify your prospects and investors using the email capability built into our CRM.
That’s it!
If you’re starting with a new business, you can get going in a matter of days. You could have your first deal published and all of your LPs invited within 1 week if that’s an urgent need, but the best time to get started is at least 4 weeks before your first raise.
If you have past or active deals, even dozens of them, you can roll out the red carpet for your LP investors with a completely up-to-date portal with our data migration service. With this service, our team takes your existing data from K-1s, subscription agreements, offering memorandums, distribution notices, and other reports and brings it all into the portal. So, when your investors log in for the very first time, they’re going to see the entire portfolio.
If you do not have active deals to migrate, you will launch as soon as you fill out our onboarding form.
If you have active deals, our white-glove onboarding may take up to 30 days. We’ll ensure that from the first moment your LPs login, all of their deals, documents, distributions, and metrics are in place.
The Groundbreaker product team actively manages the product roadmap by considering input from multiple sources. These include:
- Monthly Customer Advisory Board meetings
- Customer Support Requests
- Platform Usage Data
- Market Landscape Studies
We release significant enhancements and new tools every month. Bug fixes that are critical or inhibit our clients’ ability to work are prioritized, fixed ASAP, and released on a rolling basis. Additionally, we have a constantly updated knowledge base for your LPs, and we provide tech support via an in-app chat. If the LP asks us a question related to your business, we provide them with your investor relations contact information. See more about it in our Customer Commitment.
Suitable? Yes. Necessary? That depends on how many investors you’re dealing with and your growth goals. There’s no right answer for everybody. If you intend to grow your investment business beyond 3 LP investors, it makes sense to begin considering the impact Groundbreaker could have on your time, brand, and effectiveness.
Groundbreaker is effortless to understand for investors who are just getting in the game. In fact, it can give you a framework that aids in building your process of raising money, managing the relationships, and servicing investors.
Hear it from Heath Jones, Co-Founder at HSquared Capital: The Groundbreaker platform is extremely user-friendly and the customer service is hands down, bar none. One thing that was immediately clear with the team at Groundbreaker is that they are there to help you grow your real estate business, and they will be with you every step of the way. I would highly recommend their platform and services (and have been) to all syndication operators who are looking for an investor-management solution. You should definitely give them a try; you will not be disappointed!!!
Not yet. For now, schedule a demo where you can explore the Groundbreaker tools with our team pros. If you would rather evaluate the software with a free trial, subscribe to our newsletter (click the link at the bottom of this page) to be notified when we offer that capability.
We start with having your brand front and center, either as an extension of your website or as a standalone investor portal. Investors can browse your deals and click to invest. Groundbreaker takes the LPs through an investment workflow that includes an investor suitability questionnaire, electronic signing of subscription agreements (and any other documents), and deal funding with an easy ACH transaction. Your LPs can do all that from anywhere in the world with their computer, mobile phone, or tablet.
You’ll receive an onboarding email from your Customer Success Manager, and we’ll set up an introductory call. In that Zoom call, we’ll go over your goals and objectives and give you a guided tour of the software. Depending on your needs, we’ll cover other topics that may include setting up your first deal, sharing your portal with investors, and setting up ACH.
Groundbreaker keeps Syndicators organized and operating efficiently when it comes to raising funds and managing investments and investors.
- Having all records and documents stored in one place with central and secure access for both you and your investors provides you with a system that allows you to quickly and easily support and communicate with your investors and scale as your business grows.
- Using a standardized process for packaging deals and getting them to investors in an online offering that’s visually appealing makes you more efficient and ensures that your portfolio is easily accessible.
- Supporting an automated investment process that moves the investor from putting down a commitment amount, through investor accreditation, to signing the subscription, and then funding the deal creates a seamless experience for your investor while keeping you informed and involved at each step. Check out our features!
Groundbreaker is a software application that helps real estate investment firms and investors automate workflows for fundraising, investor reporting, and investment management. Meet Groundbreaker!
The activation and onboarding fee covers all work involved in migrating your existing data and information so that all investments, documents, distributions, etc. are up-to-date when you roll out the red carpet for your LPs. We take a very hands-on onboarding approach, which you can read about on our Customer Success commitment page by clicking here. If you’d like to go over the details, please set up a time with us.
We release significant enhancements and new tools once per month. Bug fixes that are critical or inhibit our clients ability to work are prioritized, fixed ASAP, and released on a rolling basis.
Groundbreaker tracks investor commitment, contributions, and distributions and calculates an equity multiple (total contributions divided by total distributions). Investors have visibility to their ownership %, investment date, and distributions on each investment. We are adding the ability to track property-level metrics (cash on cash, IRR), mark-to-market, distribution %, and capital account balance in the future.
Your LPs have access to support via a chat system once they are logged in to the investor portal. Our team provides support during regular business hours. Additionally, we have a knowledge base for LPs. If the LP asks a question that is outside tech support, we provide them with your investor relations contact information. See more about it in our Customer Commitment.
Jake was inspired to start Groundbreaker because he experienced the pains of managing fundraising and investor relations using basic office software tools. He underwrote distressed hotels in the 2008/09 downturn and spent more time cleaning up data and documents than doing the actual analysis. Between sending out PowerPoint presentations to investors one by one and booking investments in an Excel sheet, it became clear that this way of handling the business was inefficient.
After spending some time working in the technology sector, Jake connected the dots and realized that everything he was doing could in some way be automated to save thousands of hours of work and improve quality at the same time. Shortly thereafter, Groundbreaker was born as the first solution to automate the fundraising and subscription process for private real estate syndicates.
Groundbreaker is for the rebels. Those unwilling to accept the status quo of W2s and a life of complacency. Those who dare to be the creators of positive change in their communities.
Our platform is ideal for syndicators with teams of 1 to 25 and portfolios of $0M to $100M in equity under management who want to efficiently manage their business while offering their investors an elevated experience.
Investor contact data, contribution and distribution history, offerings, reports, and K-1s in PDF can be imported and exported to/from Groundbreaker. User metrics like deal views, document views, and email opens can be exported through customer service requests as needed.
Absolutely. Groundbreaker is designed to be easy to deploy, use and maintain. You’ll be able to do things like adding or editing your own deals, inviting investors, and sending distributions with a few clicks.
Absolutely! Your portal will have your logo, colors, and images. You can include a link to the portal from your website’s menu, in emails, or however else you communicate with your investors. When somebody clicks that link, it will open the LP portal in a new window with your logo and colors. If you want to take it a step further, we offer the option of setting it to operate from your domain.
We’re here to help you.