From guesswork to guarantee: How near real-time data is redefining the real estate acquisition timeline

The $100 billion challenge for institutional investors today is fragmentation. Teams are still spending crucial hours chasing down tax records, waiting for valuation models to refresh, and manually stitching together dozens of disparate datasets to build a single property profile. This delay (also known as market lag) is where opportunities are lost, risk is introduced, and capital sits idle.

Cotality transforms acquisition workflows by turning fragmented data into actionable insights. We provide the clarity and speed investors need to act decisively. By delivering the most trusted, near real-time property intelligence in the market, we equip investors to analyze markets, underwrite deals, and monitor portfolio risk with unmatched accuracy and speed. We give you the insight to act on the right opportunities and the data to defend every decision.

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The clarity required for market analysis

In the current environment of high interest rates and fierce competition, simply identifying a high-growth metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is insufficient. Allocating capital efficiently requires predictive clarity at the neighborhood level. Investors need to spot market shifts early, not weeks later, when the trend is already priced in.

Cotality provides the comprehensive intelligence to define your buy box with precision by:

• Spotting early trends: Our data goes beyond basic home price indices. We deliver near real-time feeds on demographics, migration patterns, land use changes, permit activity, and supply-demand balance that indicate where genuine, sustainable household formation is occurring.
• Understanding neighborhood context: True valuation requires understanding the context of the asset. We integrate hundreds of datasets, providing immediate insight into neighborhood context, including crime risk scores, school performance trends, and employment growth.

By unifying these critical signals, Cotality ensures that your investment committee materials and quarterly allocation decisions are backed by the most current and defensible data available.

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The speed of confidence in underwriting

The window for closing a profitable deal is constantly shrinking. In competitive markets, the speed of your due diligence is your primary competitive advantage. The major bottleneck is the underwriting process itself.

Institutional acquisitions teams struggle because the data they need (valuation, ownership, liens, development feasibility, and risk flags) resides in a hundred different silos, each with its own latency, format, and accuracy issues.

Cotality solves this integration headache using CLIP technology (Cotality Location Intelligence Platform). CLIP serves as a unified property identifier that instantly consolidates all necessary real estate data into a single, consistent property view for any address nationwide.

This unified approach allows acquisition teams to:

• Streamline due diligence: Instead of waiting days for title reports or manually cross-referencing lien databases, investors gain a near real-time view of legal standing, encumbrances, and ownership details.
• Validate valuation: Comparables are the bedrock of underwriting, and with coverage of 99%+ of property transactions investors can quickly and accurately develop competitive bids, benchmarked against our automated valuation models (AVMs) Cotality’s core data is trusted by Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) and top financial institutions, giving your team the assurance that your investment models are built on a foundation of industry-recognized truth.
• Optimize investment and value-add: By combining property characteristics, building details, and local permit history in one view, investors can accurately model renovation budgets and yield-on-cost projections, ensuring your value-add strategy is based on precise physical and regulatory data.

This speed dramatically reduces the time-to-decision, allowing you to move from deal screening to term sheet submission with the clarity of a dedicated internal research team.

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Defending your portfolio against silent risk

The risk does not end once the deal is closed. In fact, managing portfolio risk is a continuous process where small financial shifts can quickly escalate into systemic exposure. Monitoring thousands of assets for emerging risks is impossible without automated, near real-time intelligence.

Cotality moves beyond static property reports to offer ongoing portfolio risk monitoring that alerts you to silent threats that erode equity and increase operating expenses:

• Proactive lien and tax monitoring: We provide real-time updates on voluntary liens, special liens, foreclosure/pre-foreclosure activity, and delinquent property tax across your entire portfolio. These alerts serve as an early warning system, allowing asset managers to intervene with property management or legal teams before minor issues compound into costly losses.
• Equity and mortgage analysis: By integrating lien and tradeline data, we provide a clearer picture of homeowner equity and mortgage performance. This is crucial for managing portfolios that include distressed assets or non-performing loans, allowing investors to adjust risk models with the most current financial status of the collateral.
• Maintaining data hygiene: Given the complexity of securitization and regulatory reporting, data consistency is paramount. Our technology ensures that every property in your portfolio is consistently identified, eliminating the data fragmentation and inconsistency that often plagues large internal data warehouses and causes errors in performance reporting.

Cotality gives investors the power to see around corners, ensuring that you stay ahead of portfolio risk and maintain the pristine data required for investment committee reviews and future securitization efforts.

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Your confidence, accelerated

For the professional real estate investor, the difference between a good year and an exceptional one is measured in minutes, not months. You need a data partner that moves at the speed of the market and meets the rigorous standards of institutional finance. Cotality delivers on all fronts: trusted accuracy, near real-time feeds for low-latency decision-making, and comprehensive coverage.

Stop spending time chasing information. Start closing profitable investments with confidence and speed.

Ready to gain the clarity needed to outperform the market? Contact us today to integrate Cotality’s intelligence into your acquisition and risk monitoring workflows.

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