The commercial real estate (CRE) sector has been plagued by poor data quality, making artificial intelligence use difficult, but a recent acquisition of CRE data platform Verumex by Chatham Financial is seeking to help solve this issue.
The Kennett Square, Pa.-based financial risk management technology and advisory firm recently said it will acquire New York-based Verumex. The combined companies will allow investors and asset managers to resolve common challenges associated with poor CRE data quality, improve day-to-day efficiency and increase decision making confidence for its clients. Verumex has a data platform that aggregates, standardizes, and cleans CRE data.
Chatham CEO Matt Henry tells Mergers & Acquisitions the acquisition of Verumex allows them to take “the best-in-class data collection processes and combine them across more domains of data. Chatham has focused specifically on the liabilities side of data collection, including debt and derivatives; Verumex has been focused on operational asset and performance data; so when you put Verumex and Chatham together it unifies the data strategy.”
And this likely won’t be their last acquisition. Henry says, “we are constantly in the market and constantly acquisitive for firms that we think have great technology.” However, he notes that “there is a lot of hype around real estate technology and around AI, but there aren’t that many companies that are doing it well. We keep our eyes open all the time for high quality technology.”
When it comes to the CRE industry, the sector has been plagued by poor data quality. “A lot of the data is dirty. It is stale and incorrect, and property management firms often confuse data,” which makes it difficult to compare to each other, Henry says.
“CRE data is unique because it isn’t easy to take it and put it in a simple database. The importance of most real estate data comes from its complexity, not its simplicity,” he explains.
CRE data comes from a variety of sources, including human entry and PDF documents, among other things. The data includes things like leases, accounting information, debt payments, covenants, ESG data, capital expenditures and property expenses. The information is subject to human error and delays with entering the data, which is very complex, Henry explains.
“Without good data, real estate owners use heuristics to make decisions, so they make decisions based on overly simplistic standards instead of data. As you get more data, you can make better decisions,” Henry says.
Good data is important if you want AI technology to work. Henry explains that the Verumex platform allows clients to leverage AI and large language models. “AI isn’t necessarily good at cleaning data yet, but it requires clean data. It’s a two-step process to clean the data and once it’s clean, the power of AI is really unleashed.”
The commercial real estate industry is taking notice. Deloitte’s 2025 Commercial Real Estate Outlook says data and technology are areas where companies are most likely to focus on spending in the coming year. However, the adoption of AI in commercial real estate is still in its infancy, with organizations either researching, piloting, or are in the early-stage implementation of AI processes and solutions.
Reach Henry at: [email protected]
