The major US group RealPage, a leader in software and data analytics for multifamily properties, announced on Tuesday the acquisition of Cherre. Cherre is a provider of real estate portfolio intelligence for institutional clients. Dirk Wakeham, President and CEO of RealPage, based in Richardson, Texas, stated that the acquisition was a cash and equity transaction. Wakeham did not disclose specific figures for the acquisition.
Cherre, headquartered in Manhattan, will retain its brand name as part of RealPage. This was confirmed by L.D. Salmanson, co-founder and former CEO of Cherre. Salmanson will remain with the company as Senior Vice President. He expressed confidence in the future of Cherre, a data platform that provides decision-makers with crucial information on real estate investments, management, and market data. Salmanson emphasised the intention to expand the RealPage ecosystem and customer base.
Synergies and Data Integration
Founded in 2016, Cherre's platform unifies and analyses over 4 billion entities and USD 4 trillion in real assets worldwide. The goal is to create a reliable and compliant environment for institutional owners and investors. Through the acquisition, RealPage customers gain access to an intelligent layer specifically designed to link object-level data with portfolio and fund context. Wakeham highlighted the value this technology brings to RealPage's existing data. He spoke of 25 petabytes of data that are to be made more usable through Cherre's technology, its unified data models, and data.
For Cherre customers, integration into the RealPage platform means access to the scaling resources and global delivery capabilities of one of the industry's largest technology providers. This includes enhanced engineering and implementation capabilities, which should enable a faster and clearer path from data to AI. Salmanson underscored the importance of data organisation in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emphasised that previous approaches are no longer fully sufficient for future requirements. He sees the timing of the acquisition as perfect, as the need for more comprehensive data and support for further growth has increased.
Improving the Data Foundation for AI Solutions
RealPage intends to create an improved data foundation for its customers' agent-based solutions through the acquisition of Cherre. Wakeham explained that the main problem in implementing AI solutions often lies not in the models themselves, but in the lack of accuracy and reliability of the underlying data. With the acquisition of Cherre, customers should receive a unified source of truth that underpins their agent-based solutions.
Another advantage, according to Wakeham, is the ability to connect the performance of individual property assets with the aggregated portfolio level and the capital provider level. This would provide customers with global transparency across all their operators, which he described as a unique feature.
