Jim Hannon and Richard Sarkis

Richard Sarkis continues to be the Altus Group’s designated “software guy” three years after the Toronto-based data giant acquired his Reonomy for $201.5 million in one of the biggest proptech deals of the pandemic era.  

Since then, the Jim Hannon-led Altus hasn’t stopped innovating in the data and hardware space, focusing on streamlining its analytics to make valuations for Altus’ clients easier and more accurate, Sarkis said. That’s more important than ever in a commercial real estate industry in which generational disruptions such as hybrid work and e-commerce are making valuations much more difficult. 

“Basically, we had a pretty large customer base here in the U.S., but perhaps even more important than that is we have built out a bunch of proprietary IP and technology on the back end which is powered by AI and machine learning,” Sarkis said. “This enabled Reonomy at that time to take disparate sources of data — data that we collect on an ongoing basis, customer data — and harness it and deliver the insight and intelligence that our customers want.”

The data that Altus collects can help a landlord or other CRE professional track the performance of a property and compare that performance to similar assets and create a baseline for the building’s metrics. This allows a process of valuations to take minutes instead of days, according to Sarkis.

Sarkis and his team are now developing a product that customers will use to not only figure out where a portfolio’s valuation stands at any minute, but which can also provide predictive data that takes into account how renovations or future rent increases would affect that value.

“That is the next frontier that we are headed toward in our business plan for optimization, because that is what our customers have told us is next,” Sarkis said.