DISCERN Delivers First Platform-as-a-Service for Real Estate Financial Insight

SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- DISCERN, the leader in personalized platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for Financial Insight, today announced DISCERN Real Estate, the industry's first platform-as-a-service that informs financial decision-makers about opportunities and risks in real estate markets through personalized signals and multi-perspective data analysis. The service unifies and continuously synthesizes SNL Real Estate data, housing market data from Altos Research, construction permitting data from BuildFax, U.S. Census records, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"For decades the real estate market has benefited from declining interest rates," said Harry Blount, CEO of DISCERN. "As a result, competition has dramatically increased, which is expected to drive future returns down markedly. This dynamic has put real estate professionals under intense pressure to optimize their decision-making processes, but they need more than antiquated spreadsheets to keep up-to-date with today's complex, rapidly changing market dynamics and make well-informed decisions."

DISCERN Real Estate connects financial decision-makers to a broad and growing ecosystem of commercial and public data that is persistently augmented through machine-learning and human domain expert synthesis. Users are kept apprised of important developments, emerging threats and opportunities affecting real estate through personalized Signals-as-a-Service®, multi-dimensional pattern detection and multi-perspective visual analysis, which provide critical context and insight to the decision-making process.

Based on a unique commercial data partnership with SNL Real Estate, DISCERN has developed absolute and relative valuation signals for more than 120 US REITs, scanning thousands of different valuation relationships daily. Attractive entry and exit points corroborated by supply and demand data contribute to enhanced returns.

"Our relationship with DISCERN breaks fresh ground and opens up new opportunities – as this is the first time we have partnered with a cloud-based solution provider to offer our real estate data," said Keven Lindemann, SNL Director, Real Estate. "SNL has been following the REIT sector for over 20 years and our analysts have considerable knowledge about these companies, which provides DISCERN clients with the ability to access leading industry information at their fingertips."

DISCERN Real Estate synthesizes housing information from Altos Research at both the national and zip code level. Altos Research tracks daily the more than 100,000,000 residential properties around the U.S. Altos publishes the only complete national set of active for-sale and rental real estate listings, and the unique leading indicators of housing market demand, home prices, and sales rates.

"Typical housing data is lagging and not particularly useful for financial decision makers," said Michael Simonsen, CEO of Altos Research, Inc. "Altos Research housing market data is the first set that investors use to lead the market. DISCERN analysts have worked with Altos Research data for years to surface a rich set of tradable signals. Now, with the new DISCERN Real Estate solution, financial decision makers will also be able to see those powerful signals as they happen."

DISCERN Real Estate also unifies construction permitting data, a leading indicator of new construction rates, from BuildFax. BuildFax is the industry's foremost source for property condition data in the U.S. with more than 8 billion data points on commercial and residential structures. BuildFax is the first-of-its-kind national data source for property condition and answers essential questions about property improvements, structural risks, and changes over time.

"The BuildFax and DISCERN partnership will enable users to see an unprecedented level of detail regarding changes to structures over time, particularly commercial, residential and multi-family remodeling and maintenance," said Holly Tachovsky, CEO of BuildFax. "Understanding how structures change over time – by geography, by building type or by project type – will highlight opportunities and inform the risk profile for the real estate investment community."

DISCERN Real Estate is a module within the DISCERN PaaS which is personalized to an individual user's data sources and processes to empower financial decision-makers to create and maintain a competitive advantage. Key features include:

Persistent Monitoring: DISCERN scans the user's universe of real-time data (public and commercial) 7/24/365 and signals the user when new, relevant data surfaces.

Machine-Learning Synthesis: Machine-learning algorithms surface anomalies from broad and deep data sets, which may be missed by human analysis.

Signals-as-a-Service®: Personalized signals, including pre-set, configurable, or client-derived thresholds and patterns tied to the user's watchlist are sent to users via email and instant messaging.

Multi-Perspective Visual Insights: Relevant, on-demand visualizations make the data easy to analyze and discover non-obvious relationships. Data can be viewed by sector, by company, and/or by the user's own parameters. Users can also view data from multiple perspectives including: national and local views, views at a point-in-time and over time, and comparative views.

Domain-Specific Curators: Real Estate domain experts, who deeply understand the market and needs of investment professionals, continuously enhance and enrich the data with relevant queries, create signals and augment the intelligence gain with machine-learning synthesis.

Availability

DISCERN Real Estate is immediately available as a cloud-based subscription service that can be set up in minutes, instantly configurable and accessible through any browser-enabled device. Data from SNL Real Estate, Altos Research, U.S. Census records and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is included in the service today. BuildFax data will be available to DISCERN Real Estate subscribers by the end of 2015. For a demo and more information, please visit www.discern.com.

About DISCERN

DISCERN, the leader in personalized platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for Financial Insight, is developing state-of-the-art web applications to dramatically streamline and improve financial decision-making. The company's PaaS synthesizes disparate data into a single browser-accessible location, continually augments the data, and delivers signals and visual insights to financial decision-makers. Domain experts guide the company's data curation efforts, collectively covering energy, real estate, banking, consumer retail and macroeconomic sectors. Founded in 2009, the company is privately held and funded by Artiman Ventures and individual investors. DISCERN operates its headquarters in the Silicon Valley with an office in New York.

Signals as a Service® is a registered trademark owned by DISCERN. All other trademarks and registered trademarks in this document are the properties of their respective owners.

SNL Financial LC provides data and services to DISCERN Group, Inc., and it is not an affiliate of DISCERN Group, Inc. Services and products of the firms to which SNL Financial LC provides services are not endorsed, sold or promoted by SNL Financial LC and/or its affiliates, and SNL Financial LC and/or its affiliates make no representation regarding the quality and accuracy of those services and products.

SOURCE DISCERN

Related Links

http://www.discern.com