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Commercial real estate data firm Reonomy, a few months removed from a $68M funding round, has sealed another partnership to beef up its data offerings.
Reonomy has launched an exclusive partnership with Infogroup, bringing the data company's information on hundreds of millions of individuals and tens of millions of businesses onto the property data firm's platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The reason we like these types of partnerships that have exclusivity and are deeper partnerships than buying or licensing data, is any great chef needs great recipes and all that stuff, but covets and seeks out great ingredients," Reonomy CEO Richard Sarkis said in an interview Wednesday. "We think we have great ingredients, but our version of those ingredients are the data partnerships."
Reonomy, which has raised a total of $128M in venture funding, was founded in 2013 as a web application that scraped publicly available property data and compiled it into a searchable tool. Over the years, the business has evolved beyond the app — which is still a key piece of the offering — into working with brokerages, banks and other real estate firms to help analyze their data and translate it into a universal CRE language.
Infogroup's data, Sarkis said, will help Reonomy track owners of properties across the U.S., a notoriously difficult challenge, especially in states like Texas and California that have less stringent LLC disclosure laws. That will help banks and other enterprise clients have a clearer picture of who they are doing business with and what they actually own, Sarkis said.
"It’s more straightforward to get information on the asset they’re underwriting rather than the person or company they’re underwriting," Sarkis said. "If they have one crown jewel asset, and that's the one you're underwriting, and six more dodgy ones, that’s going to be a problem, and it’s very difficult for you to know that. This type of data is going to allow you to programmatically assess and screen every deal you do."
Other than improving its data set, Sarkis said Reonomy is beta-testing a new product with a handful of customers, beginning to gather data and research for a future international expansion and could look to make an acquisition — part of November's Series D cash is set aside for that purpose, he said. It also is planning on opening its first satellite office, in Los Angeles, this year.
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