RealMassive DataQu Provides Extensive CRE Data in Real Time

Since its founding in 2013, RealMassive has been serving the commercial real estate industry with a free-to-list, free-to-search Marketplace. This month, RealMassive introduces DataQu, a real-time data platform that joins data from 300,000 active listings in the Marketplace with historical data on 30 million properties nationwide. RealMassive CEO Mike Clark gives Commercial Observer’s Partner Insights team the rundown on this essential new product.

Q: Give us an overview of RealMassive and the RealMassive Marketplace.

The company was founded with the mission of developing a listing marketplace — a place where brokers could list commercial properties — that had accurate data and was free of duplicate listings. Over the last couple of years, we have expanded our mission by investing heavily in the underlying technology to make the Marketplace as robust as we can while leveraging that data to build a data platform that provides the most accurate and comprehensive view of market behavior. We’re trying to solve the main complaints we hear from our customers, which is that the data they get is not timely or accurate, they can’t integrate it into their internal tools and workflows, and they’re being price-gouged. We wanted to build a product that overcomes those pervasive pain points.

Q: That leads us to DataQu. What is DataQu?

DataQu is essentially a data-visualization platform. It includes data from all active Marketplace listings combined with additional data sets on each individual property. We capture and monitor data on 30 million properties including data sets such as owner information, 20 years of sales history, tax assessor information, and mortgage and lien information. Customers can isolate the data that’s important to them and examine those filtered results to derive insights that improve deal flow and processes. These filtered datasets can be downloaded directly from the software platform for easy integration into additional tools or deliverables. Our enterprise customers have found value in receiving data via an API feed to ensure that the latest commercial real estate data is instantly available.

Q: How is it possible to aggregate all this CRE data in real time?

At our core, we’re a technology company. The technology we’ve developed, and continue to develop, allows us to harvest data from many sources — directly from brokers, partners, and public sources. We remove duplicates, normalize the data, and bring it into a standard data schema, then refresh that on a daily basis at minimum.

Q: Who are the potential customers for DataQu?

We serve a very wide range, really anyone who is a customer for commercial real estate data. That could be capital markets companies, bank lenders, developers, government agencies, insurance companies, tax companies, appraisers, brokers, and even retailers or site planners. There’s a use case across almost every segment you can think of.

Q: The mission of RealMassive is to “champion the democratization of CRE data by building the most trusted and transparent discovery platform.” How is DataQu pushing the industry towards democratization and transparency?

This is core to our mission and values as a company. Historically, CRE data has been a tightly-held, precious asset. Data has been hoarded and restricted. For many years, the value proposition has been, “I have information you don’t have, and you need to pay me X number of dollars to get it. Then, I’m going to restrict how you use it.” We believe that all of this data will ultimately be a cost-effective commodity, and we intend to push that paradigm. Putting data back in the hands of the individuals who are moving the market empowers them to drive innovation in CRE.

Q: What are some features of DataQu that people should know about?

Not only are we offering our customers choice in their data provider, we’re offering them choice in the data they receive and how they receive it. A broker is a great example of a customer use case. Brokers are intensely locally focused, and they don’t need to subscribe to a product that gives them a whole bunch of data they can’t use. With DataQu, you sign up for just what you need, from a single zip code all the way up to getting the entire national data set and an API if you need it.

Q: How do you see CRE professionals applying this to get an edge on their competition?

There are many use cases across the spectrum here. An investor might be looking to invest in a certain property type — maybe they’re interested in buying an office building of a certain square footage in a certain location. They can pull comparable properties from our data set very quickly with our filters and compare it to their investment criteria. They can also look at the sales history for like properties, and even get owner information that allows them to generate leads — they can call owners and approach them about potentially buying a property. Many investors like to move on buildings before they’re publicly for sale. Having better information gives them an edge.

Q: Talk about the trustworthiness of DataQu’s data.

One of the common complaints we hear is that there’s a lack of trust and transparency in the data. The industry is consuming data without understanding whether it’s accurate, current, or derived, meaning that data is often an estimate or calculation used to suggest a complete data set. If we don’t have a dataset that we have validated for accuracy, we won’t present that data. We’d rather have a blank in our dataset than try to extrapolate a number that’s going to cause someone to make a multimillion-dollar decision that’s incorrect.

Q: When will DataQu be available?

The first version will launch in December. This is just the beginning. We have steady enhancements and releases planned throughout 2020 and will offer additional data sets and analytics packages. Our early customers have had the unique opportunity to guide the evolution of DataQu and build the solution they’ve been anxiously awaiting. With DataQu, customers will have greater access to, and more control over, CRE data than they’ve ever had before.