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Rich Sarkis, CEO, Reonomy

THE SCOOP

I had the opportunity to catch up with my good friend Rich at Reonomy and if you haven’t checked out his site, you’ve been missing out! Rich’s background includes launching and running numerous businesses including an international arbitrage textbook company, a college marketing network, and an offshore technology outfit. Most recently, he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company specializing in Financial Services. Before returning to his entrepreneurial roots, he was looking for the right business partner and the right problem to solve. He met with other Co-Founder, Charlie Oshman, at Le Pain Quotidien, for what he thought would be a 30 minute meeting. After learning about the crazy inefficiencies in the $15 trillion CRE market, specifically the very manual research process and limited access to data, Rich knew right then it was a great opportunity and was on board.

Reonomy is the largest database of CRE properties, companies, and people in the US. They cover 47M properties, 100M companies and 50M owners. Their web application allows brokers, investors, and lenders to source opportunities and contact the right owner in seconds. The enterprise APIs and applications save banks, brokerages, hedge funds, and other large institutions millions of dollars by providing seed data, performing data matching services, and offering functionality that isn’t available elsewhere.

Rich said, “It’s has been especially rewarding to see the company grow from a one-market product to a National platform, successfully. It was hard, and took us longer than I would have liked, but now I’m proud to say that we are 10x larger than the next largest CRE database in the US.”

Future plans for Reonomy include continuing to explore and develop advanced machine learning technology within Reonomy that will not only add industry changing features to their web application, but will also allow them to continue to develop enterprise products for their clients that save millions of dollars.

When I asked Rich what one piece of advice he would give to someone looking to enter the CRE tech space he said, “I think it’s extremely important to build a product that doesn’t disrupt the behaviors and workflow of the CRE professional, but instead fall seamlessly into their day-to-day. Our team has focused on working closely with customers to really understand their process and we’ve built our tool to mirror their workflow. That’s the key to CRE tech adoption.”