RealPage Acquires Cherre in Major Proptech Deal – Commercial Observer

Multifamily software and data analytics giant RealPage announced Tuesday that it has acquired institutional portfolio intelligence firm Cherre.

Richardson, Texas-based RealPage acquired Cherre in a cash and money deal, said Dirk Wakeham, president and CEO of RealPage. Wakeham declined to provide specific figures on the acquisition.

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Manhattan-based Cherre will retain its brand as part of RealPage, said L.D. Salmanson, co-founder and now the former CEO of Cherre. Salmanson will remain with Cherre as the company’s senior vice president, he said.

“We are not going away — in fact, the very opposite,” Salmanson said of Cherre, a data platform that connects decision-makers to property investment, management and market information. “We will continue to grow the RealPage ecosystem and continue to grow with our clients. I’m very excited about that. My role essentially is the same, which is to help insurance companies in the world have access to governed trusted data to be able to power their agentic future. And now we have an extra continued mission together, which is to bring that across the entire capital stack, the entire ecosystem, and leverage the existing RealPage product line, which is very broad.”

Founded in 2016, Cherre’s platform involves unifying and analyzing more than 4 billion entities and $4 trillion in real assets globally to create a vetted and compliant environment for institutional owners and investors.

In acquiring Cherre, RealPage customers will gain access to a layer of intelligence built specifically to bridge property-level data with portfolio- and fund-level context, according to the announcement.

“This was more about the value that this brings to our data,” said Wakeham. “We’ve got 25 petabytes [a million gigabytes] of data, and the opportunity for the 1 plus 1 equals 3 here is pointing the Cherre technology, their unified data models and data, against our 25 petabytes of data that’s largely unorganized and somewhat unusable.”

In becoming part of RealPage’s platform, Cherre customers will gain the scale, resources and global delivery capacity of one of the industry’s largest technology providers, including expanded engineering and deployment capabilities, the announcement added. That in turn will mean a faster, clearer path from data to AI. 

“You organize data in a certain way, and very rapidly over the last year or even the last six months, we have had to rethink a lot of that in the world of AI,” said Salmanson. “The same things that we would have done in the past don’t necessarily meet the same need in the future, and that’s part of the story happening here.

“Of course, RealPage has been incredibly successful over the years in doing that exact thing, and now that the world’s changing, obviously the needs change. And we’ve always been very focused on that specific problem. So we identified that very early on as something that we thought would be a game-changer in the future. I’d say in many ways the acquisition is just perfect timing. The world has come to where it is today, and we need a lot more data and a lot more support to be able to grow at the scale that we would like and the ambitions that we have. And RealPage is an incredibly ambitious organization.”

The immediate future for RealPage in acquiring Cherre is to provide a better data foundation for clients’ agentic solutions, said Wakeham.

“Everybody’s announcing their AI agentic solution,” he explained. “When we talk to customers, it’s not the models that are the problem. It’s sometimes the change management, but it’s mostly that they don’t have accurate, reliable data that they can base these decisions on. So they point their decision support tool at a subpar and unreliably reconciled set of data. They can’t use it to make decisions. I think the immediate thing that we’re going to see is our customers are going to have a uniform source of truth that they can use to power their agentic solutions. We have these products as well, and we think having this capability is going to advance that very quickly.

“The other thing we’re seeing is that we’re able to connect what has been largely focused on a single property asset performance. The way our products primarily work is ‘how did this property do?’ Now we are able to uplevel that, not only to the aggregate portfolio level but to the capital allocator level. That will allow clients to have global visibility into all their operators, which is a very unique feature set.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.