Introducing the Developer Recommendation Engine
Building the largest index of real estate developers operating in the United States, Canada, and the UK
Real estate is a famously opaque industry. Developers and owners often have little reason to make themselves known. For a proptech company, it might be straightforward to get in front of the REITs and major players who have teams dedicated to researching and implementing new technologies but a struggle to reach the family firm that owns 10,000 apartment units in Ohio. The latter, however, represents the vast majority of the real estate market.
At Thesis Driven, we’re aiming to solve this problem. Over the past year, we’ve built what we believe is the largest database of active real estate developers in the US:
Over 6,000 total firms and more than 18,000 executives;
No LLCs or SPVs—all are principal firms;
For each developer: what they’re building (thematically), the markets in which they operate, recent relevant articles, leadership team and contact info.
You can sign up and browse the database for free here, although viewing leadership teams and exporting results requires a subscription. (Use code “TD2024” for 20% off either the monthly or annual price.)
Our objective is to add transparency to the world of real estate development. Specifically, we aim to help people and companies looking to partner with real estate owners and developers—such as proptech companies, vendors, brokers, and investors—reach the long tail of mid-size developers and owners. A double-digit percentage of the developers in our database, for instance, don’t even have websites.
Since we released this database in beta last fall, we’ve been focused on making it easier for our users to discover the right developers. This has become more important as the database has grown. Searching for ground-up multifamily developers, for example, yields over 2,000 results in the US alone. Sifting through it all is a challenge.
AI to the Rescue
Over the past few months, we’ve done a number of things to make the database more useful. Starting this month, we’re providing Database subscribers with weekly custom-tailored recommendations of developers we believe would be the best fit for them.
We do this by using gen AI to generate a broad set of descriptive attributes for each developer in addition to their favored sectors, markets, and size. For instance, we can use public information about each developer—such as articles online about their projects, community meeting notes, or information on their website or LinkedIn—to get a sense of who cares about sustainability, who is doing urban infill, or who is building ultra-luxury product, for instance. This helps database users target the right developers more easily.
Registering for the Database now means completing a brief onboarding survey that will help us match you with the best-fit developers and owners for you.
Free features:
Access to all developer listings including themes and markets
Paid features:
Developer leadership teams and contact information
CSV exports
Custom-tailored recommendations
Of course, if you’d still like to comb through the database manually, you can do that. And we also added CSV export for paying users, although you have to filter for both market and theme to enable it. (We’re open to expanding this, and we’d love feedback from our customers on what kind of CSV downloads would be most useful.)
The paid version is $79 per month, or $640 for a full year with the discount code “TD2024”. Note that it’s a totally different product—including a separate login and payment page—from Thesis Driven the newsletter. (Sadly, Substack does not offer a SSO feature.)
Where are we going with this?
We’re not looking to compete against CoStar or CREXI by offering detailed, site-specific information. The Thesis Driven database isn’t an underwriting or deal sourcing tool; it’s about helping people discover and meet real estate developers and owners. Existing databases have robust site-specific information, but they’re Very Expensive for anyone simply looking to use them for prospecting.
Right now all developer profiles are maintained by the Thesis Driven team. Over time, we hope that more developers will take over their own profiles. Our beta users include investors, investment sales brokers, and other developers looking for partners, so we hope over time that the database becomes a channel for those connections can happen too.
(If you’re a developer and would like to “claim” your profile, you can do that. after you register for a free account, you can apply to claim a developer’s profile. We’ll ask you to provide some documentation that you’re in a leadership position at that developer, and we manually review every request.)
Want to try it out? Go here to sign up.
—Brad Hargreaves