RealMassive, the first data provider to deliver open access to the commercial real estate industry, has launched in the Chicago market today. The addition of Chicago brings the current coverage on RealMassive’s platform to over 3 billion square feet.
“RealMassive is the first real time open commercial real estate information exchange,” said RealMassive Founder and CEO, Joshua McClure. “We are a national platform and that is why we are rolling out all of these markets, especially in the large ones like Chicago. The openness allow us and customers to compute data, and not just read the data.”
McClure noted that Real Massive does not claim to own the data, they leave the ownership in their customer’s hands. “We’re helping our customers take back control of their data from the traditional data bases that currently hold their information.”
In addition, the company plans to launch in the Memphis and Nashville markets on February 2nd, 2015. The rapid series of market launches is enabled through strong partnerships with leading Commercial Real Estate (CRE) firms augmented by hundreds of researchers spread all over the country, logistically coordinated through a cloud-based framework. The framework was built and tested in the company’s test market of Austin, Texas.
The real question is how did such an amazing concept come to be? Craig Hancock, Founder and President of RealMassive, said that it all started in Austin, Texas.
“Josh and I are Air Force Academy classmates, we graduated in 1996,” he said. “We re-connected in Austin a few years ago. Josh had stumbled upon the issue of not being able to find office space for his company—a mobile app development firm—and uncovered the challenge of not being able to find out what was available in the marketplace.”
“So that was kind of the inception of the idea,” Hancock said. “The solution to the problem came from us working with Austin real estate professionals, learning what the problems were, and what they wanted to bring about and wanted to do to solve them.”
Hancock pointed out that landlords and their listing agents in a marketplace have invested interest in making sure that their marketplace in total knows everything that have available to lease or sell. “Right now, no one is really helping them get that information out there in an open data platform,” he said. “So we are helping them take their availability and market it across the internet and the marketplace.”
McClure said that adding Chicago to its platform really makes a difference nationally for their customers. “In the past there really has been only one solution where you can get a national market perspective, and that was limited because you could only read about it,” McClure said. “So with three billion square feet and having a major market—really a major gateway to the Midwest—on board allows us to provide our customers with a truly national perspective.”
That national perspective will also be further cemented when RealMassive launches in New York soon.
“But Chicago really is the toe in the water for looking at the national data picture in real time,” McClure said. “It allows asset managers who are managing hundreds of millions of dollars to make data driven decisions now. Ultimately within the next year, we will have artificial intelligence in machine learning, producing alerts for these asset managers on whether they should build industrial space in San Antonio, or buy office space in Chicago.”
Chicago is the 19th location that RealMassive has launched in. They have already launched in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, San Diego, Charlotte, Boston, Orange County, and a host of other places.
Hancock noted that although commercial real estate will never be a commodity, if you were to look at the history of the stock market and the commodities market, how things used to be traded and how information was exchanged going back 100 years versus the way it’s done today—what has transpired is a similar type of transformation that RealMassive is aiming for.
“It’s a transformation where information and data flow much more freely,” he said. “People can market their product and availability, measure demand and traction across all segments of commercial real estate with in a given market, region, or nation. Ultimately with the global asset manager view you’ll be able to do that across your entire portfolio, regardless of where you own your buildings.”
“So that’s where we want to help take the industry,” he added. “Also, the technology is really available to help implement that today, which is we have partnered with some of the biggest firms in the world—like Google and Adobe—to bring this about. We’re bringing the best to solve this problem in the marketplace.”
