Calabasas-based commercial real estate brokerage firm Marcus & Millichap Inc. has partnered with San Francisco-based real estate technology company Archer to advance itself within the property technology sphere. The terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
“Our relationship with Archer is one of the ways we continue to stay on the leading edge within the proptech space,” Richard Matricaria, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Western division at Marcus & Millichap, said.
“We value Archer’s technology and the strategic benefits they provide our brokers and clients and took the opportunity to expand our partnership with an equity investment,” Matricaria added.
Archer’s platform, which has already begun the process of integrating into Marcus & Millichap’s workflow, uses automation to expedite all fronts of the brokerage experience.
“The main goal for what we built Archer for is to really supercharge real estate professionals to be able to spend more of their time focused on the actual decision making and relationship-building parts of their process versus the data gathering and the analytics creation,” Thomas Foley, cofounder and chief executive of Archer, said.
By leveraging machine-learning algorithms to better parse through property financials such as rent rolls and operating statements and consolidate data from a multitude of sources in order to provide immediate performance metrics for multifamily real estate assets nationwide, Archer allows brokers to accelerate the market analysis and underwrite processes for its clients.
“We’re not removing any parts of the process, we’re really just accelerating all of the busywork, which saves the Marcus’ agents multiple hours so they can spend more time focused on finding and closing their next deals,” he said.
Marcus & Millichap is planning to implement Archer in a few departments within its firm, particularly its multifamily brokerage department and its capital markets business.
“I’m super excited about it. We’re already seeing a buzz and excitement within the firm,” Matricaria said. “And there’s a clear utility for it. We’re doing more and more underwriting and analysis for our clients and, given the disruption in the market, we see a clear need for it. We think it’ll be readily adopted and widely used.”
Archer recently expanded its underwriting platform from strictly multifamily to include student and affordable property types as well, and has plans to launch other property types.