Our Developer + Owner Database by the Numbers
Cataloguing 7,000+ real estate GPs in the US and Canada
The Thesis Driven real estate developer and owner database now features more than 7,100 unique GPs buying and building real estate as well as almost 24,000 executives. It’s an invaluable tool for hundreds of vendors and technology companies selling into real estate owners.
Not counting small-scale homebuilders and SPVs, we estimate there are around 10,000 total active real estate development firms in the United States, so at this point—two years in—we’ve documented a decent percentage of the market. This gives us a fair bit of insight into who is building what where.
Here are the most interesting things we found:
South Florida Overtakes NYC
While our database covers over 240 MSAs, there are far more active real estate buyers and developers in some markets than others. And last month, South Florida overtook NYC as the top market for deals with more than 920 active firms in our database. Dallas comes in third with 898 active firms.
Although we know each firm’s HQ address, we instead categorize them by the markets in which they’re active for the purposes of this analysis. So if a firm is headquartered in NYC but is only buying or building in South Florida, they’d count for South Florida, not NYC.
We get this information through a combination of local press, trade press, public filings, and developer self-reported information, so we feel it’s generally accurate and not biased toward any particular set of markets.
Multifamily is Still King
Ground-up multifamily is by far the most common asset category among developers in the database with almost 3,800 firms working in that sector. Standalone retail, single-family homes, hospitality, and industrial round out the top five.
With 42 different real estate themes in the database, the long tail is… long. Our database has hundreds of developers doing everything from student housing to historic tax credits to SFR and LIHTC… and even a number building marinas, microapartments, and data centers.
Top Competencies
Conceptually, our database’s tags are a bit harder to understand—but just as powerful.
Tags are a search and discovery feature that helps users find GPs by qualitative descriptions and competencies. We have over 50 tags that are assigned through a combination of AI and manual tagging. The “technology-forward” tag, for instance, is used to identify developers who either emphasize the role of technology at their firm (on their website or in the press) or have made investments in technology companies.
Similarly, the “sustainability” tag identifies firms that have talked about the role of sustainability at their firm—perhaps through investments they’ve made in retrofits, EV chargers, or more sustainable materials.
But the most common tags are slightly more pedestrian: firms putting emphasis on their expertise in construction management, site development, and asset management, as well as developers emphasizing their economic development activities.
Executive Presence
Earlier this year, we rolled out a feature that allows database users to search by job function. With tens of thousands of real estate development and executives in the database, users often wanted to find everyone in, say, asset management roles in multifamily firms irrespective of location.
So we now allow users to filter by job category. This required some creativity; for instance, we lumped all “Creative Directors” into the design category. While there’s still a long tail here, top leaders take center stage in the database: CEO, Managing Director, and Owner are our top titles alongside heads of development and operations. Generally, we’ll include ownership and C-level executives for all firms as well as leaders of each discipline area for larger firms.
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You can check out the database here; if you’re selling into real estate owners or developers feel free to reach out to me at brad@thesisdriven.com to set up a demo.
—Brad Hargreaves
Really cool article :)