Bisnow Exclusive: Formerly Known As ResiModel, redIQ’s New Direction Has Resulted In A Rapid Penetration Of The US Multifamily Market

The firm formerly known as ResiModel is rebranding to represent a broadened directive.  

After months of prep and an overhaul of its website and marketing tools, ResiModel is now redIQ— which stands for Real Estate Data Intelligence—and the rebranded company specializes in facilitating and simplifying the data flow process for multifamily transactions.

After roughly four years in business, the New York firm found that what started out as an add-on feature—its data capture component that captures and extracts data from PDF files and Excel spreadsheets then analyzes it using sophisticated graphs, etc.—was driving sales. RedIQ’s primary focus is now converting data sets into actionable data intelligence.

“The main driver of the rebrand was that we started out very narrowly focused. In order to address the need for standardization we focused on multifamily and our primary product was a valuation model," redIQ founder and CEO Elliot Vermes (pictured center beside sales and customer service reps William Adams and Art Melikyan) tells Bisnow.

Elliot says the firm has expanded its offerings to instantly processing and sharing properties' operating data and providing more analytics. RedIQ found its shift from valuation to standardizing what goes into the model is even more important than the financial model itself. 

How It Works

RedIQ takes property management reports that are spit out by property management systems in PDF and Excel format and makes that data instantly availble through a user-friendly platform that provides analytics easy to understand for all the parties involved in a transaction, including brokers, buyers, loan originators and servicers, and appraisers.

With the redIQ platform, everyone involved in a transaction can receive uniform information by simply clicking a link (assuming they've been given permission to access the data by another party). No more plugging in data or exchanging endless documents via email—redIQ’s platform aims to cut down the time and clutter typically involved in a multifamily transaction.

“The concept is to transform all this static data into actionable intelligence,” Elliot says. “No one cares about 45 pages of data, they care about being able to act on it. Where’s the value? What we do is convert the data into something to act upon.”

Since the company shifted its focus to facilitating data flow earlier this year, sales have tripled and top commercial real estate firms, including The Milestone Group and Berkshire Property Advisors, and deal teams at CBRE, JLL and Cushman & Wakefield, are now avid users.

“Once we released this functionality we saw sales double and triple. We have seven of the top 50 multifamily owners and many of the largest deal teams from the largest firms [as clients],” Elliot says.

More than 6,000 properties have passed through redIQ’s platform to be evaluated by clients, and Elliot says nearly 10% of the estimated 70,000 institutional-type multifamily properties in the country have been evaluated using redIQ’s platform.

The Challenge Of The Old Model

ResiModel was founded in 2011 and was known throughout the industry as a platform for capturing and analyzing multifamily data, having raised $5M in capital to get off the ground.

Initially, the company's goal was to help cut down on the unnecessary time real estate professionals spent re-entering data and building their own models to evaluate apartments and generate cash flow projections.

“The concept behind ResiModel was to create a standard platform so people could focus their time on the value that they can bring to a deal,” Elliot tells us.

But as time progressed, the firm found there was a lot of resistance from people who didn’t want to adopt its standardized model for the multifamily sector.

“Our goal was to make a standard, [but] people are very attached to their own models so there was a lot of resistance to replace it with a standard one,” he tells us.

As a result, managing the information that is exchanged amongst parties involved in CRE transactions, and converting that data into intelligence is now redIQ’s main area of focus for future growth.

“We have to continue scaling and continue driving forward to become this standard,” Elliot tells us. “It’s a ‘winner take all’ market and that’s our challenge, to get there.”