WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--RCKRBX™, the first real estate SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform delivering demand-side, voice-of-the-customer (VOC) data from current and prospective renters across targeted markets, announced today the launch of its inaugural product for multifamily acquisition, development and marketing professionals. The power of the platform comes from real-time human insights and their connections to familiar real estate market metrics and supply-side data, making it possible to paint far more holistic, vivid, and predictive pictures of a project’s future, including the populations who will live there, and the premiums they will pay, for what and why.
RCKRBX was founded by Michael Broder and James Moore, the principals of Brightline Strategies, a leading research and advisory services firm, to address the growing evidence gap in the high-stakes business of real estate investment, development, marketing and management. The company’s data models, predictive analytics, and micro-targeting capabilities were born from the science and discipline of political campaign research—the legacy of the company’s founders—and based on more than 15 years of fielding bespoke studies for the commercial office and multifamily sectors.
“Real estate product development and its investment remains one of the few industries that regularly fail to use customer insights. Combining this with the fact real estate is the largest asset class on the planet having a global AUM in excess of 4 trillion, means we have a massive part of our global economy still driven by human bias,” said Lisa Picard, a real estate and tech investor and former CEO of Blackstone’s EQ Office. “We are at a decisive moment for real estate where real returns will be a combination of the physical asset with digital layers. I see RCKRBX as a tech platform generating demand-side insights able to create guardrails for remarkable investment strategies with tactical decisions around renter preferences.”
Using the RCKRBX platform, professionals across the multifamily sector can now quantify and understand what renters want, think, and see in real-time, forecast how preference-based decision drivers will impact market demand, lease-up, and premiums of a potential project, and optimize programming to mitigate investment risk, deliver greater net-operating-income, enhance competitive performance, and maximize liquidity and returns.
“In my investment experience, the RCKRBX platform provides a key addition to traditional market research and, in effect, a third leg to the programming process. Adding RCKRBX to our existing tools greatly enhances our ability to iterate and optimize development scenarios to mitigate risk and maximize demand; on a real-time basis with the fringe benefit of a reasonable cost,” said Mark Taylor, Managing Director, Residential, AREP. “The nature of capital today means we have to have maximum confidence in our assumptions and programming. The addition of RCKRBX positions us for future success and competitive advantage, particularly as we claim first-mover ground, continually adapt our project underwriting to ever-evolving renter preferences, and capture greater premiums for delivering the right asset, in the right place, to the right audiences.”
“The ability to identify who your target audiences are for a particular project, pressure-test feasibility and underwriting assumptions through the eyes of end-users, and align programming to their drivers of demand and premiums, is a critical and needed set of insights in the post-pandemic world,” said Chris Ballard, Co-Founder and Principal, McWilliams|Ballard, a RCKRBX subscriber. “Beyond the data itself, what makes the platform unique is the ability to return to the field periodically during the design and construction process to confirm that trends have not changed, especially around decisions such as unit finishes and interior design.”
For years, the multifamily sector has relied heavily on anecdotal evidence and supply-side, retrospective market data to inform forward-looking acquisition and development decisions. “It’s always been a challenge for the real estate industry to quantify business cases, draw clear hypotheses and decipher what was causal versus coincidental in terms of past performance,” said Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, of RCKRBX. “What if you could know who your target audiences are, what matters most to them, what should be built for them, and how much they will pay for it? How might such insights change the way acquisition opportunities are evaluated, projects are designed and programmed, and renters are targeted and reached? With the launch of RCKRBX, we seek to empower users with decision-making capabilities and confidence never before possible.”
Powering the platform is a proprietary database of renter polling data points variables combined with contextual market and supply-side data. Survey datasets are updated every quarter to align with US Census demographics at the neighborhood level and include statistically powered, representative samples from statewide to sub-market/zip code levels for all covered geographies. RCKRBX utilizes quantitative research industry standards and best practices for survey design, sample recruitment, response and data quality control, and privacy protection.
RCKRBX™ was initially launched across the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia markets and will expand its geographic coverage to 14 states in 2023, including NC, SC, GA, TN, FL, TX, AZ, NM, CO, PA, and DE. For additional information, please visit rckrbx.com.
About RCKRBX™
RCKRBX™ is the most tech and data-forward research platform for multifamily real estate, where predictive polling, machine learning and big data work together to answer complex investment, development, and marketing questions. To learn how RCKRBX turns human preference into actionable decision intelligence or schedule a platform demo, please visit www.rckrbx.com
