As financial technology continues to be more closely associated with proptech, Los Angeles-based fintech company Aqueous Asset on Monday announced the launch of AVA, its AI-powered tech SaaS platform for multifamily valuations.
The move comes at a time, too, when investor interest in multifamily is hitting a years-long high.
Aqueous Asset says the new technology fully automates the commercial real estate valuation process for owners, developers, investors and brokers, determining the accurate value of a multifamily property in seconds.
“Aqueous is designed to create liquidity in the entire commercial marketplace,” said Nick Segal, CEO and co-founder of the company. “When we were looking at creating liquidity for investors and developers, we realized that in order to be true to form we had to have an authentic, credible valuation mechanism to evaluate property. So, AVA was born out of our own necessity.”
AVA’s current database includes more than 4.3 million multifamily properties across the country, with additional property types to be included in updates, according to Aqueous.
Unlike other proptech companies, such as Bowery, which are designed to make valuations more accurate and efficient for appraisers, AVA is a more intuitive platform that allows users to type in an address and receive a detailed valuation report in less than 10 seconds, according to the company.
Additionally, users get access to a series of projected rent rolls, can review supporting sales and lease comps, and can refine their evaluation for increased accuracy. The platform is designed to be interactive, enabling property owners to input details of the property that only they would know.
The platform pulls data from seven different sources, including title companies, Moody’s Analytics and Moody’s REIS, and public records, to provide a range of values for the user that Aqueous says is 98 percent accurate. “But the beauty of what we’re doing,” Segal said, “and what’s really important is [that the owner has] the ability to completely refine all the data points, the ability to refine your rent roll with the algorithm” that AVA provides.
The owners’ inputs into AVA are cross-checked using the local comps that the company extracts from its data points, Segal added.
AVA is privately funded through friends and family investors, as well as debt, having raised $4 million, said Segal. “We will be going into a seed round after we launch, but we’re also going to start to create revenue almost immediately.”
Aqueous plans to further expand AVA’s platform beyond multifamily valuations, too, said Segal.
“Our focus now is multifamily, but we will go to mixed-use, new construction and then high-rise and strip [malls]. We can do every dynamic of commercial real estate, as long as we have those specific [application programming interfaces] and those data feeds.”
The company is in talks “with one of the largest [multiple listing services] in the country here in L.A., Beverly Hills and down to Palm Springs,” Segal said. “They’re very interested in being able to offer this tool to their agents. That could be our first enterprise user at a very grand scale. If we hit with them, we’re off to the races.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
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