Analyzing 71,000 Real Estate Executives

This time last year, the Thesis Driven Developer and Owner Database had catalogued fewer than 20,000 real estate executives.

Now, we're at 71,000.

All of them executives, asset managers, investors, and others actively working at firms building and buying real estate. Not service providers or tech companies, but real developers – complete with contact information.

As far as we're aware, it's the largest database of real estate contacts to ever be built.

So what can we learn from it?

One, as we've expanded the database to include the full universe of small and middle-market developers, a larger share of the executives have a simple title: "Owner." Today, almost 11,000 of the contacts in our database are simply "owner," passing "managing director" and everything other than "CEO".

The most common non-CEO/Owner title is Operations; we catalogue 11,900 executives with operations titles.

Beyond that, investor relations, accounting / finance, development, and asset management round out the top five. Asset management is a particularly critical role to many of our subscribers, as they hold the purse strings for many software purchases. We have 2,099 asset management executives.

To visualize these, we removed the top categories: "CEO," "Owner," "Operations," and "Managing Director," which together had over 43,000 entries.

But some roles are much rarer than one might think if you've spent a lot of time with institutional firms and REITs. From what we can tell, there are only 805 technology-focused executives employed by the universe of real estate developers and buyers. Many middle-market firms, after all, outsource their technology decisionmaking. So if you're running a proptech company aiming to sell into CTOs and Heads of Innovation, your viable audience is likely under 1,000 people.

Others are even rarer. Sustainability executives? Only 79. And "Experience" executives? 54.

Finally, I'd like to share some weird roles we came across while doing this exercise. More than a thousand executives couldn't be classified at all, as we weren't totally sure how to translate their title into something more comprehensible. Some of our favorite actual titles include:

• Chief Morale Officer (2)
• Chief Happiness Officer (4)
• Chief Visionary Officer
• Chief Networking Officer
• Chief Transactions Officer
• Chief Greenhouse Officer
• Chief Caffeine Officer
• Chief Storyteller
• Check Signer
• Consigliere
• VP of Life Enrichment & Cognitive Programming
• Head of Transformation
• New Home Matchmaker
• General Council [sic]
• Visioneer
• Dealmaker
• Urban Strategist
• Urban Alchemist
• Energy & Shine Captain

For those selling into the real estate industry, happy prospecting.

If you'd like to get access to Thesis Driven's real estate developer database or request a demo, you can check it out here.

-Brad Hargreaves