Expediting Real Estate Development and Reducing Risks of Real Estate Investment Pactriglo

For many years, Los Angeles has built its reputation as a city where all dreams can come true. Yet Los Angeles grapples with a housing affordability crisis and chronic homelessness. Real estate prices keep going up, the existing real estate data analytics and visualization platforms are not detailed enough, and the entire City of Angels seems to be running out of room. A powerful real estate intelligence platform is required to solve these rising issues and step up the pace of real estate development.

Pactriglo is a Los Angeles-based real estate intelligence platform that brings speed to real estate development and certainty to real estate investment. The company’s supercomputer analysis identifies those properties with the lowest entitlement risk and incorporates contemporary building construction activity data to add certainty to site selection decisions. The firm’s custom consulting reports deliver distilled insights that can save you countless dollars by identifying bureaucratic obstacles before you buy. Benjamin Pezzillo, CEO of Pactriglo, spoke to CIO Bulletin on how he and his company is transforming land data into opportunities for success.

Interview Highlights

Q. What makes Pactriglo relevant in today’s times? Could you give us some context?

We help our clients find their competitive advantage by analyzing their areas of focus. Cutting everything else out allows us to get extraordinarily granular and provide insight into the future by enabling relational searches not available elsewhere.

Let’s say our client wants to know about every property in Los Angeles zoned for industrial use. Okay. But they also want to know if there are properties with industrial use supported by the General Plan Land Use but are not zoned for industrial use. It is a little bit more complicated but lucrative information that puts them ahead of others.

Q. How do you stay on the pulse of the growing landscape of Real estate?

You might say that we stay “overly informed” on legislation and city planning decisions that bring changes to the future landscape.

Q. It’s hard to remain objective when huge amounts of capital are at stake, especially in volatile conditions. How does data analytics help in making objective decisions?

It takes things out of the theoretical and puts them into a concrete basis of knowledge. In other words, when a client says, ‘Our strategy is X. Okay,let us find out the exact number of potential ‘X’ that exist.

That can be an eye-opener because once you take it out of theory and define the existing potential, it may take that strategy off the table.

It’s a little bit like mining. We may believe that there is gold in a certain place, but we must mine to find it.

Which one supports confidence in investors? Those who haven’t done the mining versus those who have mined and identified the actual potential. You already know the answer to that question.

Q. There are other reputed companies in the market, how are you a better service provider?

We’re not trying to build an information product for everyone. We provide custom analysis and real estate information systems built for our clients’ needs. And we do that in an industry where the decisions are expensive, but the benefit of competitive advantage from knowledge dwarfs our fee.

Q. Does your data analysis tool empower users to retrieve, combine, interact with, explore, and visualize data from any combination of sources?

Yes and no. We build custom real estate information systems based upon a custom database from a custom analysis. Certainly, interactive web map applications are a commons deliverable and a flat file of the database for those who like working in a spreadsheet. Maps help with geographic context. Flat files  help with crunching numbers.

Q. Experts predict that the failure of trusted algorithms is bound to happen. How can you make your solution foolproof?

We speed analysis and certainty; we don’t replace either.

Perfection is the fool’s errand. There is no such thing. Meanwhile, you can be the best without perfection by achieving what others haven’t or can’t (i.e., best in class).

Q. A good workplace stresses teamwork while still encouraging individual achievement and creativity. Does your company follow the same strategy?

Yes, it’s critically important to recognize individual contributions to the team effort. Each team member knows what their teammates are working on and how all the different pieces must fit together in the final product. That allows for internal collaboration, peer review, and team troubleshooting. Silos aren’t good for what we do.

“We provide custom analysis and real estate information systems built for our clients’ needs. And we do that in an industry where the decisions are expensive, but the benefit of competitive advantage from knowledge dwarfs our fee.”