Local Logic and Rental Beast have integrated their services to expand the Canadian data firm's U.S. reach and provide Rental Beast a more robust database of information for both real estate industry professionals and consumers.

The partnership will also arm those looking to rent a home in the U.S. with over 85 billion data points tailored to help them find the right apartments in the right locations.

Local Logic is a Montreal-based location intelligence platform which digitizes the built environment for consumers, investors, developers and governments.

Listings and intelligence platform Rental Beast, headquartered in Somerville, Mass., offers an SaaS platform which it calls the most comprehensive in the U.S., with 11 million property listings.

“We have created the largest location dataset in the industry, with over 250 million addresses mapped in our system,” said Vincent-Charles Hodder, CEO and co-founder of Local Logic, in the announcement.

“That kind of knowledge enables Rental Beast users to make more relevant recommendations to their rental clients, and in turn, clients to make much more informed decisions about where they live."

It’s believed to be the most comprehensive location dataset available in either country. 

“Rental Beast’s comprehensive data plus Local Logic gives our users the most detailed view of rentals in their area,” Ishay Grinberg, the founder and CEO of Rental Beast, said in the announcement Monday.

"We look forward to continuing this partnership and to adding more features and listing details to our database to serve the needs of our customers."

The data Local Logic can provide

One key anxiety today for urban renters can be too much competition for dwindling rental inventories.

However, Montreal-based Pierre Calzadilla, Local Logic’s executive vice-president of growth, told RENX the tool could help alleviate their concerns. He said Local Logic provides up to 18 rental scores for a property.

“One of the big things you can do with this is understand the tradeoff," he explained.

"We all want to live in downtown Toronto, let’s say, or wherever, and the reason might be because of the transit options, the ability to be close to theatres or bars and clubs, or whatever else, and with our tool you can look at a whole city and spot and discover another neighbourhood that actually has inventory and less competition.

“You might have a longer commute, but you’d gain everything you want in your life and save some money. Our E-maps help with that. It’s a really good discovery tool to find a spot that may match your needs that you may not have considered otherwise.”

While the Logal Logic system contains 250 million U.S. and Canadian addresses, consumers can actually experience what it would be like to live in a neighbourhood by being taken directly to street level, where among other things they can see the distance to the nearest coffee shop or subway station.

They can even get insights into whether the location might too noisy for them. 

The data rates everything from a listing’s walkability and pedestrian scores to accessibility to entertainment and noise levels. Local Logic has even introduced a wellness score, a composite of healthy restaurants, walkability, parks, outdoor spaces, gyms and other features.

Developers can also utilize the data

“It has all these components that would impact somebody’s ability to live a healthier lifestyle,” Calzadilla said. “It’s a unique way to look at the world. We also have a vibrancy score and we quantify how vibrant an area is, which is a bit different from a lifestyle score.”

The data trove isn’t solely consumer-facing, though — as a data aggregator, Local Logic’s platform has also assisted developers searching for their next profitable building sites.

“A real (estate) developer is trying to create something. If you want to build in downtown Toronto, congrats, you will have a full building,” Calzadilla said.

“But if they want to find out where in Greater Toronto to build, let’s say Guelph or Hamilton or Burlington, or they want to stretch themselves to ‘beater’ markets, because people can’t afford Toronto, you want to find out where they’re moving, we will show them where the expansion is happening.”

Calzadilla is alluding to what he called “place-making,” which he defined as building communities incipiently. He said it provides housing for the growing cohort of residents priced out of major centres like Toronto and Vancouver.

“They are trying to create housing in places where, today, there is not much, but they’re creating new centres of commerce or new centres of art, and that’s where we help developers by providing them with data that helps them understand the impact of decisions they may make, as well as what that particular community in question might need,” he said.

Calzadilla related the story of a Montreal-based developer which was looking to build housing for seniors. It used the firm’s expansive data to help figure out which part of the city would best be served by such a development, ultimately justifying the investment and bolstering its bottom line.

“Universities are even asking us to how they can use their land to create more vibrant campuses,” he added.

“Our data supplies all three of those things: help consumers and cities in how they can optimize themselves and developers how they can build better for community.”