No Longer An ‘Illusion’: How Dwellsy Is Bringing Reliable Rental Data To A Surprising Range Of Customers

Dwellsy CEO Jonas Bordo has a couple of ways to judge the success of his company, a residential rental marketplace and property data provider that sources its data directly from property managers and management company direct feeds. One of them is just what he hoped to see when he co-founded the company in 2019: a growing pool of satisfied customers and properties listed on its platform.

The other — its expanding roster of clients who are using its data in unexpected ways — comes as a bit of a surprise, he said. But in either use case, Dwellsy has emerged as a trustworthy provider of property data in a niche muddled by controversy and litigation, Bordo said. 

“One of our future clients convened a meeting of data scientists and researchers in early 2023 to ‘solve the rent data problem,’” Bordo said. “They found out about Dwellsy's offerings from a participant, and we're honored to have been able to measure up to their high standards since we began to work together.”

Bordo said the Dwellsy platform today lists more than 15 million rental units, accounting for 32% of the single-family and multifamily rental inventory in the United States. A growing base of commercial real estate users depend on its data to build revenue management systems or to make better-informed asset management or underwriting decisions.

“We would never have gotten to this level without the support of so many forward-thinking people in the industry for our platform, which they can see represents a true marketplace,” he said.

Bordo said another way to assess the property market’s embrace of Dwellsy is in its appeal to customers who were not even on the company’s radar five years ago. These include developers or entrepreneurs who use its demographic data at the local level to help select ideal locations for businesses such as new restaurants or medical offices. Other Dwellsy users are trying to make sense of broader macroeconomic trends.

In either case, they represent an unanticipated source of demand — and validation — for the company’s methods, Bordo said. 

“Hedge funds have found success for a variety of trading strategies, and universities are doing research, all based on our data,” he said. “It's being built into trading strategies for location-based businesses of all kinds and used to appraise the values of homes. We would never have predicted those use cases.”

Bordo said these outcomes are a vindication of Dwellsy’s data-gathering practices, which avoid the limitations of other platforms while steering clear of price-fixing accusations that dog some rival companies.

Prior to Dwellsy, there was an “illusion of good rent data in the industry, but those with data science capabilities recognized that the quality, timeliness and risk issues often made previously available data sets insufficient,” he said. 

That was because common data collection methods “struggled from a few fatal flaws” that Dwellsy has been careful to avoid, he said. For one thing, data sources can be quite fragmented, making it extraordinarily difficult to aggregate rent information, Bordo added.

“There are an excess of 40,000 professional property management organizations in the U.S. and a further 10.5 million individual landlords,” he said. “Most do not provide their rent data to any one platform, so few sources get even close to 10% of available rents, when far more is necessary.”  

There can be doubts about the accuracy of some data as well. For instance, if it is scraped from existing internet listing sources, there is a risk that it is fraudulent or expired.

“We've yet to see a scraping technology that can successfully weed out these so-called ghost listings. So the data is, at best, pointing to what the truth might be. But it's not the truth,” Bordo said.

Other data might be compromised by flaws in their sources. Rent surveys, for example, are a common source of data but are not always known to be accurate. Contracted rent data, too, is increasingly seen as imperfect.

“We're seeing a new awareness of its limitations and risk through the collusion lawsuits currently impacting those who have used this type of data,” he said.

Dwellsy avoids these pitfalls by sourcing its data directly from more than 20,000 property managers. This allows it to capture nearly a third of U.S. rental listings, or about triple the scope of other platforms, he said.

Bordo predicted that Dwellsy, which he said is already the largest rental listing platform, will continue to represent a larger share of rent data customers, whether they are CRE professionals or others engaged in peripheral fields.

“We’ve been blown away by the support of the industry for Dwellsy and for a true data marketplace,” Bordo said. “We knew there was a gap in the market when it came to quality rent data, but we’ve been shocked by the breadth and depth of the opportunity and the demand for our offering.” 

This article was produced in collaboration between Dwellsy and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.