Five Ways to Use the Thesis Driven Database
Tactics for finding the right real estate owners out of 6,500 companies and 20,000+ executives
As regular Thesis Driven readers know, we’ve spent the better part of the past 18 months assembling the largest list of real estate owners and developers out there, now live online as the Thesis Driven Database. But while it’s full of valuable information—especially for companies selling into real estate owners—we’ve found that many folks need some help figuring out the best way to dig through it to find the right prospects.
So here are five of my favorite searches, creating custom prospect lists based on search criteria I’ve seen some of our real-world customers use. As examples, we’ll use the database to assemble lists of:
“Core” multifamily buyers;
Affordable housing developers building in walkable communities;
Tech-forward office owners;
Historic tax credit developers in Minneapolis;
Opportunity zone investors and developers.
Each query will produce a list of firms—and key executives at each with contact info—that can be browsed in the site or downloaded in CSV format. We’re committed to keeping the database far more affordable than other real estate data tools; an annual subscription is only $67 per month.
And Thesis Driven readers can get 20% off the database using the code “TD2024”.
Let’s take a look at a few example searches:
1. “Core” Multifamily Buyers
Of all the queries we’ll do today, this one is the most straightforward, as “core multifamily”—that is, buying apartments to hold long-term—is one of the 42 different themes we cover alongside ground-up multifamily, urban office, retail, and niche concepts like marinas and self-storage.
Simply filtering the main search for “core multifamily”—or going to the Core Multifamily theme page—will return a list of thousands of multifamily GPs making core investments. Easy enough! Although since we don’t allow users to download an entire theme as a CSV, you’ll need to filter for at least one other thing—a tag or a market, perhaps—to download a contact list of principals.
(Principal contact information is sourced from multiple places including firm websites and contact databases like Apollo and Seamless. We have email addresses and LinkedIn profiles for a significant majority of all contacts in the databases, and mobile numbers for some but not all.)
2. Affordable Housing Developers Building in Walkable Communities
In this case, we’re going to find affordable housing developers focused on building in walkable communities. Doing this search requires combining a theme search and a tag search.
The theme search is pretty straightforward: like last time, we’ll choose “Affordable Housing” as our theme (instead of “Core Multifamily”). This returns a list of all affordable housing developers. We’ll then add a tag search for “Walkable,” generating a list of developers who build affordable housing in walkable communities.
It’s important to note that themes and tags are generated in different ways. Themes are populated by hand by the Thesis Driven content team, so we have very high confidence that they’re accurate. Tags, on the other hand, are generated by AI based on everything we know about that GP—their website, articles, public information, et cetera. We’ve found them to be generally correct but occasionally imperfect, which makes sense given that many tags are subjective in nature.
3. Tech-forward office owners
Our method of generating tags can be used in a lot of different ways. For instance, we’ve gotten pretty good at identifying and tagging real estate owners we believe are tech-forward and willing to try out new tools and products. We do this by analyzing text from their websites and articles about the firm as well as their behavior; for instance, any firm that attended NMHC OpTech is tagged as “tech forward”, and we plan do this with all major shows.
The “tech-forward” tag, therefore can be used to generate a prospecting list of office owners who are more likely to be receptive to hearing about new technology. We’ll do this by running two searches, combining the “Tech Forward” tag with our two office categories: “Urban Office” and “Suburban Office”. (Right now this needs to be done through two separate searches, making this easier is high on our roadmap.)
Each list can then be downloaded as a CSV including firm principals and their contact information.
4. Historic Tax Credit Developers in Minneapolis
To date we’ve documented 406 firms doing historic tax credit development in the United States. Of those, 20-30 operate in Minneapolis. Generating the list of HTC developers operating in Minneapolis involves combining a theme search (HTC) with a market search (Minneapolis-St. Paul), which generates a list that can be exported if desired.
(Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean a firm has specifically done HTC work in Minneapolis, it means they’ve done HTC work at some point and also own and/or develop in Minneapolis.)
5. Opportunity Zone Investors & Developers
In addition to covering the normal real estate food groups and some niche asset classes, the Thesis Driven database covers a number of investment strategies of interest to our customers. For example, we catalogue real estate GPs focused on placemaking as a strategy, groups executing covered land or land banking strategies, and even companies making OpCo-PropCo investments.
But the most popular example is opportunity zones, where we catalogue hundreds of developers actively pursuing opportunity zone deals as a part of their investment strategy. Since OZs are one of the 42 themes we cover, generating a list of OZ-focused developers is fairly straightforward and only requires a single filter:
We’re keeping the database continuously refreshed, updating 100-150 developer profiles every day. If you’d like a 1:1 demo, just click the “request a demo” button on our homepage and we’ll be in touch!
—Brad Hargreaves