Transforming In-House Debt Sourcing with Lev

Transforming In-House Debt Sourcing with Lev

Background:

Greenleaf Management is a diversified real estate firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with a focus on multifamily, industrial, and retail assets across the Southeast. The company maintains an in-house capital markets team led by seasoned professionals like Alaina Owens, Director of Capital Markets, and Partner Andrew Ziffer. With a growing lender network—expanding from 70 to over 100 institutions—Greenleaf has traditionally managed financing operations manually through email, spreadsheets, and internal systems.

Challenges

Despite the team’s deep expertise and robust network, Greenleaf faced several key operational challenges:

• Manual Workflows: Debt procurement relied on custom-built OMs and spreadsheets to track lender appetite, quote comparisons, and communication logs.

• Scattered Communication: Email threads and lender updates lacked centralized organization, making collaboration across team members difficult.

• Market Visibility Gaps: With a changing lender landscape, the team lacked real-time intelligence on lender activity and quote trends.

• Scalability: As Greenleaf evaluated more deals, the lack of automation limited the team’s ability to scale without adding headcount or compromising speed.

As Alaina described, “At one point, I was managing six loans simultaneously. We’ve grown our lender list significantly, but our tracking still lives in an internal system. There’s just a lot of manual effort.”

The Lev Solution

Lev’s platform presented Greenleaf with a centralized, intelligent, and scalable solution to these challenges. During onboarding and trial setup, the team discovered immediate alignment between their goals and Lev’s platform capabilities:

1. Automated Contact and Email Sync

With secure email integration, Greenleaf can now send deals to lenders straight from their inbox, while Lev automatically logs communications, quote statuses, and responses in one place.

“The platform will send the deal from our own email—lenders don’t even know we’re using Lev. That’s critical for keeping our relationship-first approach.” — Alaina Owens

2. Smart Deal Matching

Lev’s algorithm uses historical transaction data, live market feedback, and lender program updates to match deals to optimal lenders. The team can view lender fit by type (banks, life cos, credit unions), market activity, and asset class preferences.

3. CRM for Lender Relationships

Instead of scattered notes and Excel files, Greenleaf now has a purpose-built CRM to manage their lender relationships, complete with contact history, term tracking, and customizable tags.

4. Rapid Deal Room Generation

“It’s pretty amazing to see our deal room created in five minutes. That alone saves hours of prep time per deal.”

5. Pipeline and Workflow Tools

Greenleaf uses Lev’s Acquisition Pipeline to track early-stage deals and seamlessly transition into the financing workflow. Tasks, documents, and contacts are centralized for each transaction.

Results

Although early in their adoption, Greenleaf has already seen meaningful improvements:

• Time savings: Streamlined quote comparison, document generation, and outreach automation save days of work per transaction.

• Improved collaboration: Team members can now share and manage deals across departments, with clear visibility and access controls.

• Greater lender engagement: The platform’s tracking and smart follow-ups increase lender response rates and create a competitive market for each deal.

• Flexible deployment: Regardless of the deal type, the team can tailor each deal room and lender strategy accordingly.

“Lev is completely transforming how we run debt procurement .” — Andrew Ziffer, Partner