Investor Tech Startup Altrio Partners With RCA, Cherre And StateBook To Speed Up Deal Analysis
In the decades since the internet was invented, industries across the board have been transformed by web-based platforms that create new ways of working. From online pharmacies to virtual banks, more and more business has moved online.
However, the way investors in the $10 trillion real estate capital markets industry screen and underwrite investments has barely changed over the past decade, according to Raj Singh, CEO of Altrio, a software company on a mission to bring real estate investing online. Today, investors gather documents containing fragments of information from sellers or brokers, then painstakingly pull information together from numerous other sources to complete the picture of the opportunity. All this is done in Excel, a manual process that is time-intensive and potentially full of errors.
Altrio’s first product, Origin, gives investors a new way to quickly understand investment opportunities by providing a unified view of the investor’s internal market knowledge and data from external providers. The firm has grown quickly and recently announced a collection of new partnerships with key providers of commercial real estate market data.
“We believe investors want more from deal management software than deal tracking,” Singh said. “They want to be able to extract insights from the knowledge they’ve amassed and make those insights accessible by the whole team — in real time.”
New Partnerships
Origin works by combining investors’ proprietary information about deals they have underwritten or properties they own with market data sourced from Altrio’s network of data partners. Altrio differentiates its tools from others in the market with its method of ingesting and combining data, Singh said. The aim is to create a comprehensive but easily mineable database of market intelligence that allows investors to move more quickly than their competition.
The partnerships announced by Altrio in 2021 increase the company's sources of data significantly. New partnerships with StateBook and Cherre bring a trove of economic, demographic and public records such as tax or crime data into Origin, saving investors time that would normally be spent hunting that information down.
In June 2021 Altrio announced a partnership with Real Capital Analytics, a leading provider of capital markets data. This allows Origin users to compare new opportunities in their pipeline with historic transactions at the click of a button.
“The investors we serve have typically spent a lot of time pulling together information about properties and markets — macroeconomic trends, risk, zoning, sales and lease comps — to build their investment case,” Singh said. “Through our data partnerships, we will automatically surface a lot of this information right when our customers need it, so they won’t waste time screening the wrong deals. All the data they need is out there — Origin brings it all together in one place, which has never before been possible.”
Set For Growth
Both Singh and his co-founder, Jon Simpson, are fintech veterans. Singh was a co-founder of Hipercept, which was acquired by RealPage, and the founder and CEO of Voyanta, which was acquired by Argus. Simpson, meanwhile, was deputy chief technology officer at FundApps, a fintech regulatory compliance startup. In Altrio, the two have pooled their knowledge to bring innovation to the real estate investment industry.
Altrio serves customers of all sizes, from teams as small as two or three investors to two out of the three largest investors in the world. These customers manage more than $500B of real estate and use Origin to manage transactions from Sao Paulo to Sydney. Singh said the firm has plans to add more data partnerships in 2022 and to triple the size of its team.
“Real estate investing is a huge industry that has barely been touched by technology," he said. “We could keep innovating for the next decade and not even come close to running out of ways to improve the way this industry works.”
This article was produced in collaboration between Altrio 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.
