Thoma Bravo Buys RealPage; Move Shows Growing Value Of Market Analytics

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo’s deal Monday (Dec. 21) to buy property management platform RealPage for $10.2 billion including debt assumption marks the second acquisition in less than a week of a company that provides valuable data analytics for a consumer-facing industry. Car-selling platform Vroom agreed just a few days earlier to pay $120 million for CarStory, a used-car sales site that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data and predict consumer purchasing trends.

RealPage serves as a platform for rental property owners and managers where tenants can pay their rent, submit maintenance requests and the like. However, the system also gathers data to forecast where markets are heading.

RealPage brags that its clients, who own or manage more than 19 million rental units worldwide, can “gain transparency in asset performance, leverage data insights and monetize space to create incremental yields” by using the platform.

Thoma Bravo Founder and Managing Partner Orlando Bravo said in announcing plans to buy the firm that RealPage’s “industry leading platform is critical to the real estate ecosystem and has tremendous potential going forward.”

“Our firm has a track record of acquiring cutting edge software providers to specialized industries and driving their innovation and growth while remaining true to their core business and customers,” he said. “Together, RealPage and Thoma Bravo can partner to grow the company’s market offerings and enhance its current capabilities to capitalize on the increasingly complex and expanding real estate market.”

Not coincidentally, Vroom cited similar analytics potential when unveiling plans on Dec. 15 to acquire CarStory, a firm that Vroom has already worked with for two years as a client. CarStory not only serves as a platform for car dealers to sell used vehicles, but collects data from shoppers to predict such things as how long a given vehicle will stay in inventory.

Vroom called CarStory “a leader in AI-powered analytics and digital services for automotive retail. Leveraging its machine learning, informed by more than 7 million listings per day and more than 18 million consumer sessions per month, CarStory brings the industry’s most complete and accurate view of predictive market data to Vroom’s national ecommerce and vehicle operations platform.”

While Vroom will use CarStory in its own operations, it has no plans to block the company from continuing to sell data to rival car sellers — presumably so CarStory can continue to collect lots of market analytics.

“As part of Vroom, CarStory will continue to drive automotive retail innovation by aggregating, optimizing and distributing current market data from thousands of automotive sources and offering its digital retailing services to dealers, top automotive financial services companies and household names in automotive industry research and retailing,” the company said.

Former Kelley Blue Book Executive Editorial Director Jack Nerad wrote in an analysis of the deal for Forbes that Vroom “made the acquisition to enable it to continue to leverage the machine learning provided by CarStory.”

“It is the predictive nature of the information that is most useful to Vroom,” he said. “After crunching mounds of data, CarStory shows how price changes can affect how long a vehicle stays in inventory. In the pressure-packed world of used-car retailing where every day counts because every car represents both a big investment and an opportunity cost, having this insight is key to maximizing inventory turn and thus profits.”

Vroom CEO Paul Hennessy recently told Karen Webster that his company focuses on collecting all sorts of data on every vehicle in its inventory.

“We have over 40 data scientists and data engineers that think about nothing but finding the right cars that match demand, making sure they’re priced to move [and] making sure that the consumers value the price,” he said.

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