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Mortgage rates continue to rise and the global housing shortage has yet to improve, but investors are apparently bullish on the prospects for Local Logic, a location intelligence provider for real estate that announced Wednesday it closed a $13 million Series B raise.
GroundBreak Ventures and Investissement Québec led the round, with participation from Band Capital Partners, an affiliate of Triovest Realty Advisors, Cycle Capital, Desjardins Group, Jones Boys Ventures, Second Century Ventures, and Shadow Ventures.
Founded in December 2014, the Montreal-based proptech startup uses its software to research location-based risks and opportunities for residential real estate stakeholders. The company focuses on quantifying residential real estate neighborhoods as to their history, current state and future viability for home buyers, investors and developers, said Vincent-Charles Hodder, CEO at local logic.
“We mostly focus on residential, but we’re really asset class agnostic in the sense that we’ve really focused on everything that happens outside the four walls of an asset,” said Hodder. “We try to quantify the things that are outside, as real estate’s a special beast in that it’s a unique product in a unique location. We also focus on application fees, which we think is about half the story of value.”
As many challenges rattle the housing market, Hodder said the latest funding for Local Logic highlighted some of the greater needs of housing stakeholders.
“Folks are saying, ‘I need to better understand risks and opportunities associated with specific investment,’” said Hodder. “And data analytics has been a trend that we’ve seen over the last few years. It’s accelerated, but there’s also this speed that was needed in terms of deploying capital.”
Consumers and others in the housing ecosystem are looking for more in-depth and alternative data, Hodder said.
“They’re looking for more sophisticated ways of deploying capital and they’re looking to do it in a way that is a more technology-first approach,” he added. “And so that’s played in our favor. We’re seen as the leading location intelligence provider in terms of understanding how to leverage this unique and proprietary data facet of real estate value in their underwriting decisions and the way they look at the market.”
Local Logic plans to use the Series B funding to expand its partnerships with broker sites and MLS organizations to impact real estate decision-making in the United States and Canada. In addition, the company will augment its product suite with new software geared to democratize location insights.
“Many factors go into making real estate investment and development decisions, and location is not often one of them,” said Scott Kaplanis, managing partner at GroundBreak Ventures. “We believe in Local Logic’s mission to make cities more sustainable by bringing deep insight into location-based risk and opportunity to those making high-consequence decisions in housing and the built environment.“
Despite the current housing market’s difficulties, Hodder sees growing opportunities for Local Logic.
“I think we’ve already proven to investors that we are the de facto location company in this space,” said Hodder. “We have 15 million unique users a month, we’re generating billions of data points every quarter, and we have full coverage of the U.S. and Canada. We really want to double down on this. We think there’s still a ton of opportunity in terms of launching new products, and bringing more predictive and prescriptive insights to market.
“We don’t want to be seen as a data company. We’re really trying to bring insights to the market, and what we mean by that is we’re trying to answer questions for an institutional fund or for somebody looking to buy the best house for their family.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
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