Forget What’s Hot. These Experts Are Using Analytics To Find What’s Next

Five years ago, Ryan Kang was frustrated with the data analytics products on the market as he worked on the investment team at Willton Investment Management.

“I was using several software products, but none gave my team the granularity we wanted to see in the market research analysis,” Kang said. “The products were restrictive. They were providing opinions and telling us what to do rather than letting us tool around with the data.”

That experience stuck with Kang. While getting a master’s at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, he met Dennis Lee, who worked on the research analytics team at another firm, Lionstone Investments. Lee's role involved identifying the next investable location and providing the acquisition and development teams with the insights they needed. Leveraging his background as an urban planner prior to joining Lionstone, he applied his research on emerging gentrification areas to real estate investment, generating greater value in the process. 

“If we can identify the next investable locations and secure deals within those targeted areas, while others focus on current hot markets, we could achieve higher returns with less competition,” Lee said.

Lee always had these ideas about how to tell someone why they should be investing in certain markets, utilizing urban planning and real estate data, he said. While in graduate school, he learned where to find right and reliable data sources for each important data point for multifamily and other asset types of real estate. He shared those insights with Kang.

“As a result of our experience, we understood how acquisition teams work and which data is needed at which stage of the acquisition process,” Lee said. “We understood data usage within this niche of the industry.”

Lee and Kang found they enjoyed spending time together and had complementary skills.

“We wanted to build something that our younger selves would have found useful,” Kang said.

Fast-forward to 2024 and Lee and Kang are the co-founders of Market Stadium, a location data analytics platform that gives users the opportunity to manipulate hundreds of data points, informed by users’ own perspectives on the market to test their investment theses.

“Every real estate investor has a different perspective,” Lee said. “It is the essence of why real estate transactions, or any transactions, occur in a market economy.”

Rebuilding From Scratch

While clients are signing up at a rapid rate, that wasn’t the case initially, Kang said.

“For the first six or seven months after incorporation, we didn’t have any clients,” said Kang, who serves as president and leads business strategy, daily operation of business and new client acquisitions. 

After visiting South Korea a few times and pounding the pavement in Silicon Valley, the duo received $2.7M in venture capital funding, including from the government of South Korea.

Kang and Lee, who is Market Stadium’s CEO, spent the next 18 months developing their platform. Market Stadium is part of Berkadia’s Accelerator program and began an official partnership with Schack Institute of Real Estate.

Initially, its platform was asset-class agnostic and designed for a variety of users within commercial real estate. It aimed to serve investors, lenders and brokers in multifamily, office, industrial and retail as well as other property types.

“We beta-tested with a dozen companies and the feedback we got was ‘great-looking product,’ but no one was signing contracts,” Lee said. “We realized we weren’t satisfying any type of user 100%. The platform was only providing 60% of what anyone needed.”

Kang and Lee went back to the drawing board to narrow down Market Stadium’s target customer persona, homing in on multifamily.

“We both had experience with multifamily specifically and understood the acquisition process in that space,” Lee said. “We rebuilt the platform from scratch.”

The results were immediate.

“Clients started signing up,” Kang said. “Users told us that with our platform they can accomplish things in 30 minutes that would have taken them five or six days using disparate data sources before. Our annual subscription is expensive but it is worth it.”

Kang also gained traction for Market Stadium’s product by posting regularly on LinkedIn. He now boasts 12,000 followers, with about 70% to 80% of Market Stadium’s sales pipeline coming from the social media platform.

“We tried other channels as well, like emails and cold-calling,” Kang said. “But LinkedIn worked specifically because I think I could build credibility and position Market Stadium as a thought leader in the industry.” 

Market Stadium started making progress with institutional investors who were investing in single-family rentals and built-to-rent portfolios in addition to multifamily.

Today, users of Market Stadium include acquisition teams for multifamily and SFR as well as real estate developers, Kang said.

“The biggest differentiation, and the most common positive feedback we have been getting is that the product seems to understand their work process,” Kang said. “Users say they can get the right data at the right phase of their investment and development work processes.”

Boundary Granularity

There are many location data analytics tools available on the market, Lee noted, and most of them provide great building-level information in a detailed way.

“But except for Market Stadium, there’s no research tool that provides market boundary granularity,” Lee said. “ZIP code level is the lowest level of granularity available.”

Market Stadium can go more granular by leveraging ZIP code-level data and combining with census data, which has data at least five times more detailed, Kang added.

The platform provides users with more than 500 data points that are highly correlated and necessary for multifamily and SFR investment processes, he said. These include gentrification potential, climate risks and commuting patterns.

“These are all key data that empower investors to make smarter, more informed decisions,” Kang said.

Users can then choose the type of data set they want and customize to create their own data sets, or dashboards, with 50 or 60 preferred criteria.

“The dashboard then spits out the user’s personalized index,” Lee said.

These dashboards include an interactive map that enables investors to click through to do a deeper-dive analysis into any census tract and view Market Stadium’s 500-plus data points, Lee said.

“We don’t tell or try to teach users which data they should be using in their analysis,” Lee said. “We named the company Market Stadium because we wanted to create a venue for everyone to come and play with the data, rather than just being spectators.”

Lee, Kang and their team of PhD data scientists continue to tweak the platform and have plans to grow.

“Once we’re satisfied with the multifamily platform, we will expand to other asset types, starting with industrial,” Kang said. “We also want to broaden the user base to lenders, brokers and other real estate professionals, like architects.”

This article was produced in collaboration between Market Stadium 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.