Marketproof helps real estate data flex its market muscle: Tech Review

Marketproof presents gleaming data-powered visualizations for better understanding market activity and trends in some of America’s largest and most complex cities.

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Marketproof is a data-visualization solution for tracking residential inventory in New York City.

Platforms: Browser

Ideal for: Buyers/investors, agents, brokers, lenders

Top selling points:

• Flexibility of data points
• Functions like a “CRM” for properties
• Stacking plans
• Variety of uses
• Market reporting and analytics

Top concern:

If any, Marketproof may have a hard time pushing into the consumer market, simply because hard real estate data isn’t super palatable to those real estate consumers subsisting on Zillow scrolling and open houses. Then again, this is really sharp software, so I may be wrong.

What you should know

Marketproof is a browser app for deeply exploring the New York City real estate market (and soon, others.) The software does for high-rise and urban residential properties what TopHap does for land and CORE Present does for listing presentations, and that is present gleaming data-powered visualizations for better understanding market activity and trends. It also reminds of Imerza.

Its data is intricately curated, allowing for widely flexible reporting and performance insight. Brokerages, agents and investors who want to know more than others would benefit from a subscription.

If you’ve been reading my column for a while, you know that I tend to be biased toward anything map-centric and graphically intelligent. I like software that uses clever iconography, minimalist interfaces and color-coding. (In an odd bit of contrast, however, I’ve never once — ever— used an emoji.)

Marketproof reaches into vast public data coffers to craft actionable performance reports, trend predictors and sales intelligence. Entering a building address kicks off what I would deem an addicting ride into the matrix of a building, allowing users to see variables on price-per-square-foot, average sales price-per-unit, asking price trends, sales velocity, lending histories and a host of other ways to examine activity.

The intent here is for real estate agents to become as informed as possible about how a building (for now, condos mostly) is interacting with its market and then how each unit, sold, pending or active, is interacting with its host property. Thus, Marketproof demonstrates the organic nature of real estate and empowers users to choose how they consume it.

Perhaps the standout tool within Marketproof, heat-mapped Stacking Plans are created automatically to communicate unit size, asking price averages, discounts and other aspects needed to accurately devise offers or listing strategy.

I used to create stacking plans with Adobe Photoshop, layering manual colorized information bars over scanned photos of commercial high-rises. Talk about tedious.

Customers can build mailing lists, review multiple forms of charts and line graphs, and see what’s on happening on the new development front, such as a building’s pending footprint and market impact.

Marketproof allows for 3D touring of a city too, a feature that will be enhanced upon the April launch of Marketproof Pipeline, a major component of the system that will detail “the who of each property.”

Marketproof is putting together an editorial team and recently hired its director. Properties will have colorful narratives and community histories to accompany their data stories. There will be timelines, more 3D imagery and even a social media component to further assemble a tangible presence around buildings.

The company is aiming for new markets this year. I was told Miami, San Francisco and Austin are on the menu.

All told, it’s hard for me to not highly recommend Marketproof for anyone related to real estate in the New York City market. Not every real estate tool you use has to create a straight line to new leads. There’s tremendous value in software that makes you a smarter, more analytical professional.

And that tends to lead directly to new business.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.