Cadre to Use Foursquare’s Data to Evaluate Investments
By Chava Gourarie February 27, 2020 11:00 am
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Real estate investment platform Cadre will license Foursquare’s location data, becoming the first real estate investment firm to do so, according to information from Foursquare.
Cadre, a crowdfunding platform where accredited investors can participate in commercial real estate deals, will use Foursquare’s data to help identify and evaluate investment opportunities, according to Kristen Vasan, the head of partnerships at Foursquare. Foursquare’s products, which include its Places API and foot traffic data, are used by companies like Apple, Uber and Twitter for their mapping and location-based applications.
“One of the things that Cadre valued, one of our strengths is we’re really good at telling you when little mom-and-pop shops are opening and closing,” Vasan said. “That matters where there’s a lot of turnover.”
For Cadre, Foursquare’s data provides meaningful information about neighborhoods, and about the radius around a given asset. Foursquare can identify all the venue types for a given zip code—whether it’s populated by brunch spots and pastry shops, or bodegas and laundromats—which can tell you a lot about the vitality of a neighborhood, said Vasan.
Foursquare works with a variety of retail companies and brokerages, but Cadre is the first investment firm to sign on as a client, Vasan said, and is using the data in novel ways.
(Disclosure: Cadre co-founders Jared and Joshua Kushner are the brothers-in-law of Observer Media Chairman and Publisher Joseph Meyer.)
Foursquare, launched in 2009, started as a social app that consumers used to check in to locations, for badges, awards, or to keep track of where they’d been. Foursquare’s popularity peaked a few years later, but they were sitting on a treasure trove of crowdsourced location data, so the company pivoted from a consumer app to an enterprise data company.
Its suite of products include the Places API, which gives users access to Foursquare’s comprehensive venue dataset, which can accurately identify and categorize millions of venues. Foursquare has over 13 billion check-ins in its dataset, and continues to manage its Swarm and City Guide apps, along with Panel, an app it acquired when purchasing Placed from Snap Inc. in 2019. The check-ins from the apps, as well as a volunteer corps of superusers, provide the company real-time foot traffic numbers, demographic data, and information on store openings and closures.
That’s not to say that its data is limited to check-ins; when the app is downloaded, it can passively track a phone’s location even when the app is not in use. And Foursquare’s Places modeling can accurately predict whether a given user is in a bar, the office above it, or stopped at a traffic light several feet away.
Cadre’s platform starts with a minimum $50,000 investment, which can be divided into five assets or invested in a single deal. They have $2.5 billion in asset transactions and invest in multifamily, office and hospitality sectors.
