Building a Lean, Flexible Finance Function for a Legacy Real Estate Firm

Many companies outsource their finance function to access expertise they couldn't find or afford in a full-time hire. For others, outsourcing makes sense because the business itself has changed.

That was the case for a Philadelphia real estate firm with a long history of owning and managing commercial, multifamily, and hotel properties. As its founding partners moved toward retirement and sold off or spun out much of the portfolio, the firm shifted its focus to managing commercial office properties for a third-party owner. Its CFO retired around the same time.

The firm still needed experienced finance leadership and accurate property accounting. But with a smaller portfolio, staffing those roles full-time no longer made sense. G-Squared Partners stepped in to provide both, at a level of support that fits the business it is today.

Today, G-Squared Partners serves as the firm's outsourced CFO and property accounting team. We handle the accounting for the commercial properties the firm manages, including accounts payable, monthly closes, and the reporting the firm and its property owner depend on.

A typical G-Squared Partners engagement starts with a cleanup or a rebuild. Here, the firm already had well-established processes, so we adopted them. Our team works in the firm's accounting system, follows its procedures, and delivers reporting in the formats its stakeholders already know. For the firm, the result is the same reliable numbers it has always had, with a finance function sized to its current operations.

The firm's needs have shifted several times, and our support has shifted with them.

When the firm needed help with a second commercial property in a new market, G-Squared Partners took on that property's accounting and closed the books for both properties side by side. When the second property later moved to new management, we scaled back. Today, as the firm prepares to add a second Philadelphia building to its management portfolio, it knows it has a finance partner that can scale with its business once again.

That flexibility is the core of the relationship. The firm pays for the support it needs at each stage, without carrying full-time salaries for part-time workloads.