Starting a company is like childbirth… You forget how painful it was, and decide to do it again. We said we were done with new companies. More than once. Apparently, we’re not good at keeping ideas in our heads. We like to say that working for a large company is like being dragged behind a bus. You’re dragged bloody and in pain while you repeatedly hit the ground and have no idea where you’re going. Occasionally you go flying around the corner and catch a fleeting glimpse of where you’re going, just to find yourself bouncing against the asphalt again. Somebody’s driving, but who knows where?! Starting a new company is like being a boxer. You mostly get punched in the face. Hard. Really hard. However, you get to see some of the punches coming, and every now and then you get to land a punch of your own. If you’re really good, you even have a chance to win. We prefer being boxers than getting dragged behind a bus.
Cherre was born out of frustration. When we sold our last company to Oppenheimer we thought that we could easily expand our platform from late-stage private equity into real estate. If we could collect and resolve millions of data points in a fast-paced and complex ecosystem such as equities, how difficult could it be to replicate the process for real estate data and holdings? Really difficult apparently. While not as fast paced or data rich as equities, real estate data is much more challenging to collect and resolve. Real estate data has been, and still is, isolated, partitioned, private, and siloed. Real estate professionals, investors, developers, and intermediaries, have used asymmetrical data to create competitive advantages. These advantages, real or perceived, have been ingrained into their strategy and workflow models, and have further created asymmetrical understandings of all aspects of a property.
The current process of sourcing, processing, and consuming real estate data is slow, expensive, manual-heavy, and error-prone. The data is limited in accessibility, and is often very expensive. The process requires a robust and centralized effort to gather data and make it available to consumers, professionals and laymen alike. Such limited access is to the detriment of the entire ecosystem. It limits the share and transfer of knowledge, it limits derivative work, it limits transparency, and it limits the overall advancement of better and more comprehensive solutions for the benefit of society.
We started Cherre to change that. We’re building a collection and resolution Platform-as-a-Service to allow investors, insurers, brokers and other large enterprises to collect, resolve, and augment real estate data from thousands of public, private, and proprietary internal sources. By providing a “single source of truth,” Cherre hopes to give its partners a competitive advantage, helping them analyze and evaluate opportunities and trends faster and more accurately than ever before, while saving them millions of dollars in manual data collection and analytics costs.
“On the top the mountain we are all snow leopards” goes the Hunter S. Thompson quote. There are currently just a few such folks at the peak, and we envision a world where we can all be snow leopards.
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