A weekly series on the AI tools and workflows reshaping real estate capital raising — starting with how to build an investor database in hours, not weeks.
Since launching just over a year ago, we've grown Thesis Driven's developer and owner database into the largest repository of real estate GPs out there, with more than 8,100 active development firms and 28,000 executives. Our hundreds of subscribers include technology vendors serving the real estate industry, as well as investment sales brokers and investors tracking their markets.
A year in, we're still building, and we're excited to share a few new things we've rolled out in recent weeks.
When we launched, our database covered 42 separate investment themes, from ground-up multifamily and suburban office to hospitality and opportunity zones.
But real estate evolves, and we're excited to launch nine new asset classes, featuring developers building and buying:
Resorts
Membership Clubs
Agriculture
RV Parks
Golf Courses
Industrial Outdoor Storage
Small Bay Industrial
Schools
Car Washes
For the most part, these new asset classes represent categories of growing interest among real estate GPs and investors – including a few we've featured here on the editorial side of Thesis Driven.
Regular Refresh Schedule
As we've said before, Thesis Driven's developer database is curated by hand – built and verified by real humans, not AI.
And now that we've moved past the bulk of the building phase of the database, we've committed to updating every GP profile at least every four months. This includes verifying that all executives still hold their current jobs and their contact info is, to the best of our knowledge, correct.
We are also aiming to add more executives to the database, particularly mid-level asset managers – for many of our vendor customers, the asset manager is the key decision-maker.
Projects
This feature is still in progress, but we've begun including key projects in each developer's profile. This will give subscribers the opportunity to understand the individual deals on the operator's mind – and reach out at the right time in the project's life cycle.
To be clear, we're not looking to replicate CoStar's level of detail. We're focusing on basic information such as unit count, location, date, and asset type, while making it timely by tracking zoning and permit filings as well as local news.
Better Filtering Tools
The filters on our developer / owner search page are the heart of the database – it's the best way to create highly targeted lists of developers and executives.
And we've made it much better over the past few months, adding the ability to filter by units owned, units managed, executive titles, and more – and download CSVs of companies and executives.
Filtering for capital markets executives at firms that build affordable housing, have 5,000 - 25,000 units under management, and attended Blueprint in 2025
On the Docket
In the coming months, we'll continue to release new features that better serve our subscribers. Foremost among them is an API that will allow customers to automatically bring contacts and accounts from the GP database into their CRM – e.g., HubSpot or Salesforce. We'll also build custom triggers – such as a new project being added – that will flag potential customers at the right time for sales outreach.
It's awesome to be building this alongside the Thesis Driven community. As always, if you'd like to talk through how the database could work for you, we're always down to chat – just hit "request a demo" here.
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
