Dutch-based technology platform Lisa BV has launched its smart leasing platform in SA after acquiring its core leasing technology platform from Inospace, SA’s largest last-mile logistics operator. Rael Levitt, founder and CEO of Inospace, announced Lisa’s breakthrough market entry and confirmed that Inospace has entered into a three-year license agreement for Lisa to manage its half-a-million-square-metre property portfolio.
Several South African property companies have already contracted with Lisa, which is rolling out its solutions to listed and unlisted property companies with portfolios of more than 200,000sqm and 200 tenants.
“Inotech was launched in 2021 to market and lease our high-volume multi-tenant property portfolio. Leasing-focused technology was a game changer for Inospace, making it one of the fastest-growing private property owners in SA’s challenging commercial property market. Responding to demand for our proptech platform from other property funds, Inospace sold it to Lisa so that we could focus on being a last-mile logistics property owner and operator,” says Levitt.
Lisa is a leasing, marketing, asset management and tenant experience platform for the commercial real estate industry. Its tenant-lifecycle leasing software helps property owners, managers, brokers and tenants align in a unified platform to execute leasing transactions.
Valued at around US$20m, Lisa recently raised over US$2 million in new funding. Buffet Investments, backed by South African property billionaire Jonathan Beare, led the initial funding round. Levitt joins the company’s international board alongside Lisa’s Dutch CEO, Hein Pretorius.
Lisa offers three integrated products. Lease, the core product, manages automated lead-to-lease processes for multi-let property companies. Market provides automated campaigns to commercial property owners and brokers, streamlining marketing and leasing workflows and delivering powerful tenant demand data and analytics. Engage is a tenant experience solution that enables property owners to get as close to their customers as possible.
Lisa’s core leasing and marketing services are already available in SA and will be launched in Europe in the second quarter of 2024. Lisa Engage will also become available in the first half of next year.
Lisa has already enhanced Inotech’s leasing platform through intensive development, building on its two-year development and fine-tuning at Inospace. Levitt explains how the smart leasing platform transformed Inospace’s operations: “Leasing out a fast-moving portfolio using Excel spreadsheets and manual processes was tedious and time-consuming, making it extremely difficult to be agile and approve deals quickly.”
One of Inospace’s KPIs is occupancy, but in industrial property, these are high. “Demand isn’t the challenge,” says Levitt, “It’s having accurate demand-side data about what tenants were prepared to pay in a supply-constrained market.”
With Lisa, property owners can now drill into analytics to understand which buildings and expiring leases have the highest demand or revenue risk and strategise around them based on real-time demand data. “Lisa resolves inefficient, slow and inaccurate manual leasing processes and eliminates outdated market information in a fast-changing environment,” says Rael Levitt.
