Highly secure data exchange

Elystan Capital Partners GmbH focuses its business activities on the purchase of office and commercial real estate with added value potential.

The aim is to reposition the buildings by Elystan modernizing them and developing new, sustainable usage concepts.

Elystan intended to sell a property with over 100 tenants and a gross floor area of ​​44,000 sqm to a private equity investor as part of an off-market transaction. In preparation for the due diligence, Olaf Schlüter, Managing Partner of Elystan, looked for suitable service providers for scan and data room services.

Through a recommendation, he got in touch with Mike Riegler, managing director of the PMG and CDS group. Mike Riegler advised him on a complete solution for scanning and providing the data via a data room. “It was crucial for us to set up the data room with all the documents as quickly as possible in order to enable potential buyers to start the due diligence promptly,” reported Olaf Schlüter. “In cooperation with CDS, PMG has provided us with the best complete solution for data room and scanning. We were able to start within three days.”

Elystan had already prepared the necessary documents for the transaction and indexed them using tabs. The CDS scan team digitized around 60 folders within 3 days. The documents to be scanned also included large-format blueprints. Each document was categorized according to the index points. CDS then passed the data on to PMG for upload to the data room.

Mike Riegler advised Elystan on setting up and creating the folder structure for the due diligence process. PMG employees then uploaded the scanned documents directly to the folder structure in the PMG data room. “PMG accompanied us through the entire process of setting up the data room,” explained Olaf Schlüter. “This enabled us to set up the data room quickly without using up too many resources internally.”

A total of around 70 users from eight participating companies accessed the documents in the data room. They included the buyer as well as his advisors and service providers. On the seller side, legal and tax advisors used the data room in addition to Elystan. Olaf Schlüter uploaded additional documents requested by the buyer using the drag-and-drop upload of the PMG data room. He informed everyone about a new file by email. The attached download link led directly to the corresponding document. The buyers were spared laborious searching for the information.

In the course of the transaction, both parties decided that the property company should also be included in the due diligence. To prepare for the share deal, PMG’s support team worked with Elystan to revise the folder structure of the data room. “All changes were implemented immediately and professionally,” confirmed Olaf Schlüter.

The Q&A module of the PMG data room enables the audit-proof management and control of questions and answers during due diligence. The process can be structured using any number of stages. It is also possible to link questions and answers with individual documents. The workflow for Elystan was configured as follows: Every user on the buyer side could ask questions using the form of the Q&A module. Olaf Schlüter took the questions from the seller. He checked them and passed them on to his specialists for an answer. He checked and processed their answers before making them available to the other side. The Q&A module also enables questions to be linked to documents. “If you refer to a specific document for questions and answers, we make communication extremely easy during the due diligence process,” said Olaf Schlüter.

After the successful completion of the due diligence, all data was transferred to a data carrier by PMG. This also contains all questions and answers as well as the logs of the data room activities. The data carrier is part of the contract documents for the sale.