Dive Brief:
- RealPage has acquired Cherre, a New York City-headquartered real estate data firm, to create an artificial intelligence-powered intelligence platform underpinned by accurate and connected industry data, the multifamily software giant announced in a Tuesday press release. The firms did not disclose the terms of the deal.
- Cherre has spent about 10 years cleaning up data regarding billions of industry entities to create what it says is a reliable pool of information for AI to pull from, according to RealPage’s release. The deal will give owners and operators a foundation of industry data that is validated — that is, accurate, consistent and otherwise quality-controlled — which they can use to make decisions and improve performance.
- The move is the first acquisition under Richardson, Texas-based RealPage’s new CEO and President, Dirk Wakeham, according to a company spokesperson. Cherre will retain its name and its team will join RealPage. Cherre Co-Founder and CEO L.D. Salmanson will become senior vice president.
Dive Insight:
The real estate industry is increasingly turning to AI to make important management decisions, like where to direct capital and how to improve operations, according to the release. However, AI is only as good as the data beneath it, and that data was built to report, not to reason, Wakeham told Multifamily Dive in emailed comments.
“Cherre spent a decade building the layer that resolves identities, governs meaning, and connects everything into a knowledge graph AI can actually reason across,” Wakeham said. “Put that together with RealPage's operational depth across the property lifecycle and you connect the property to the portfolio to the fund… for the first time, in one governed foundation.”
Real estate industry data can be unverified and disconnected. An example RealPage gave in its release is that a property can appear as one address in a leasing system, a different unit number in an operations platform and a separate parcel ID in a tax record. Most platforms treat that single property as three unrelated assets, so the AI model cannot confidently answer even basic questions, such as why the net operating income changed at a given asset.
“The data may all be there, but until something resolves those identities and governs what the data means, no AI can reason across it,” according to the release. “This is the gap now stalling AI across the industry.”
To address this issue, Wakeham said in the release that Cherre has built governed intelligence that institutional owners and asset managers can depend on.
“We're connecting what happens at the property with what matters at the fund level [to create] the first platform to unify data, trust, and infrastructure across the entire real estate capital stack, every asset class,” Wakeham said. “And it's built open: Cherre works across any PMS and any data source, and every data asset stays in the customer's control.”
Cherre’s platform spans more than 4 billion entities and $4 trillion in assets that are sourced and governed in a secure, compliant environment, per the release. The platform offers tools to bridge property-level data with portfolio- and fund-level context, and it will remain an open hub with clear permissions, security controls and governance standards.
The compliance factor is critical, because RealPage has faced numerous lawsuits over its algorithmic pricing software used for setting rent prices. It settled one major case with the Justice Department at the end of 2025, but other lawsuits are still ongoing.
"The work we've done at Cherre was building toward the moment the industry needed to move from reporting to reasoning,” Co-Founder and CEO L.D. Salmanson said in the release. “Joining RealPage lets us bring that future to the real asset ecosystem faster, without changing how we work with the clients who trust us today."
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