Local Logic co-founder and CEO Vincent-Charles Hodder. (Courtesy Local Logic)

Local Logic has compiled more than 85 billion data points which identify lifestyle and location attributes in cities, and the Montreal-based firm is expanding how it puts them to use for real estate firms, investors and developers.

“We strive to use data to quantify cities and see what aspects of those cities drove value to particular real estate properties,” co-founder and chief executive officer Vincent-Charles Hodder told RENX.

“Our background as urban planners really helped us cover the various data sets and elements that we needed to quantify in order to try and predict the future of the real estate market.”

Hodder founded Local Logic with Gabriel Damang-Firois and Colin Stewart in 2015 and they started commercializing the technology in late 2016. The Montreal-based company has received venture capital funding from several partners to help spur its growth.

Local Logic collects data from public sources, including municipal, provincial and federal governments, as well as open data platforms. It also purchases data and builds and assembles some of its own collection processes to round out its knowledge base.

Local Logic services web portals

Local Logic has two categories of products.

The first is geared to large real estate web portals, such as brokerage websites, to help them increase traffic, engagement and conversions.

“We offer a suite of products that we license to these companies or individuals in order to show relevant location characteristic data on their pages,” said Hodder.

In addition to charging a licensing fee, Local Logic uses tiered pricing that’s dependent on the volume of traffic to websites using its information.

Clients in Canada and the U.S. include Realtor.ca, Royal LePage, RE/MAX, Sotheby’s International Realty and Century 21, which use the company’s technology to enable five million monthly consumers to specifically search for what they’re looking for in a place to live.

Local Logic’s platform can present multiple complex layers and scores for more than a dozen factors — including transportation, schools, noise and parks — which make a location unique.

The platform can present its scores and data points for global positioning system coordinates or individual addresses. It can incorporate visuals, maps, heat maps and iconography.

The content is constantly updated to maintain its accuracy.

Local Logic’s analytic product line

Local Logic’s second product line, which was just launched a few months ago, includes analytic tools designed for investors, portfolio managers, developers and other real estate professionals.

“We’re combining all of our proprietary data on location with some more traditional real estate data sets and we’re combining that with a lot of usage data that we’re gathering from our customers and their end-users as to what they’re searching for,” said Hodder.

“We’re really trying to understand and predict what factors of location and what factors of an amenity within a home is driving value today and in the future.

“We’re working with some large firms in Canada to help them think through where they should be investing or how they should be thinking about redevelopment of properties they already hold.”

Local Logic clients for this line include Ivanhoé Cambridge, DevMcGill and Maître Carré.

“Companies are starting to take data science in real estate really seriously and are looking at alternative forms of data in order to de-risk their investment process and be more intelligent in the way they’re looking at the market,” said Hodder.

Current and future growth

Local Logic has 25 employees and is looking to double that number in the next six months with new hires across North America as it transitions to “a remote-first approach” that will still include some physical office space but reduce what it’s using now.

“We’re looking for people who’ve been in the real estate space who want to move to the tech and startup side,” said Hodder.

While Local Logic’s primary focus is currently on the residential real estate market, Hodder envisions opportunities to move seriously into the commercial sector in the future.

“We’re certainly generating revenue.

“The majority of our business is on the portal side, but we’re starting to make pretty good strides on the analytic side of the business and we’re seeing our ability to grow substantially over the next few years, given the traction that we have today.”