Special Edition: LightBox CEO Eric Frank on How Connecting CRE Data Lays the Foundation for Smarter Decisions

To mark the 100th episode of the CRE Weekly Digest, co-hosts Manus Clancy and Dianne Crocker welcomed LightBox CEO Eric Frank for a wide-ranging conversation on the how and why he set out to modernize one of the world’s largest asset classes: commercial real estate. 

Eric traced the origins of LightBox to a simple observation: CRE was 20 to 25 years behind other financial markets in the maturity of its data and technology ecosystem. Eric described the imminent launch of LightBox Live, which promises to replace the fragmented, email-driven deal workflow by consolidating listings, data rooms, due diligence, and counterparty communication onto one platform. On the hot topic of AI, Eric pushed back on hype, stressing that accuracy and data integrity matter far more than speed.  

The conversation also looks ahead to what the next few years could mean for brokers, lenders, investors, and developers as the industry moves toward more connected data, streamlined workflows, and faster decision-making. Underlying it all was a consistent theme: LightBox exists to give CRE professionals their time back. Whether it's surfacing environmental  or natural hazard risk before a deal goes sideways, resolving fragmented property records to a single LightBox ID, or digitizing lease abstracts so analysts stop cutting and pasting, the mission is to eliminate the friction. As Eric put it, the best deals of tomorrow won't be won by technology. They'll be won by the developers, lenders, and brokers who have more time and better data to apply their own expertise and relationships.

One hundred episodes in, this special edition explores the trends, technologies, and ideas that will define the next era of commercial real estate.

01:15 The Origin Story of LightBox
07:00 Solving CRE's Data Fragmentation Problem
13:55 The Future of CRE Workflows and LightBox Live
22:55 AI, Automation, and the Biggest Industry Misconceptions
29:55 Environmental Risk, Property Intelligence, and Better Decisions
35:45 The Power of Connected Property Data
39:40 What’s Next for LightBox and Commercial Real Estate

Have questions for the pod team? Send them to Podcast@LightBoxRE.com. 

www.lightboxre.com

Transcript

The CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox

Episode 100: Special Edition – LightBox CEO Eric Frank on How Connecting CRE Data Lays the Foundation for Smarter Decisions

June 5, 2026

Dianne Crocker: This is the CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox, a firm transforming the commercial real estate landscape by connecting every step of the CRE process with comprehensive tools and data. I'm Dianne Crocker here with my co-host, Manus Clancy. Manus, this is a special edition commemorating our one hundredth episode of the CRE Weekly Digest.

It's hard to believe. 

Manus Clancy: Exciting times. I'm looking forward to it. We have a special guest today, and I'm looking forward to jumping right in. 

Dianne Crocker: So as we celebrate this milestone, we're very honored to have today's special guest, LightBox CEO Eric Frank. 

Eric Frank: I don't know about honored, but I'm happy to be here with you guys.

It's exciting, number one hundred. 

Manus Clancy: Well, thank you for joining us, Eric. It's great to have you here. I know we speak regularly, but you're new to our audience here. So I was hoping to get a little bit of background on LightBox itself. I think perhaps Dianne and I take this for granted sometimes. We talk a lot about LightBox data.

We talk a lot about the appraisal procurement process, the AI process, the environmental due diligence process. But I'm not sure we've ever given people a view about how LightBox came to be and how deep its tentacles have been. I know we were founded in two thousand eighteen. So if you can give us a background of what inspired you to start LightBox in two thousand eighteen, and when you go through the cocktail party circuit, how you define LightBox these days.

Eric Frank: Okay. Very good. Well, I hope we have a long, long time for the podcast to go through the, the inspiration, but it was actually quite simple. A latter stage in my career, I was in information services for financial markets. So my customer base at that point were investors and investment bankers and wealth managers and analysts and folks that used financial information and data to make, you know, good decisions on buying and selling stocks and bonds and companies.

So I had that as a background. And after I left, I had an opportunity to sign on to executive chairman role to a company that owned a number of business to business businesses, and a few of them were in commercial real estate, loosely. Trap company called Acceligent and SiteCompli and EDR. And I was helping, uh, the owner.

Basically, they were holders, not really operators, and looking across the portfolio, and I took some time to learn a little bit about real estate. And it just came to me that there were a lot of analogies. There were a lot of similarities, real estate being the largest asset class. And a lot of the end users that were customers of these companies were themselves analysts, investors, very similar to what I knew from the, uh, financial market side.

But the big difference as I started peering in was that this industry didn't really seem to have that ecosystem of vendors supporting it. And then in part, it looked to me to be like twenty or twenty-five years less matured than where I had come from. That would look like information being very fragmented, not information not being shared and democratized.

A lot of organizations having to try and organize information and technology individually at each one of those organizations, which is not really a good use of capital. If you're a brokerage firm or you're a lender, you're really not in the business of collecting market data and organizing it, and so forth.

Long story short, as I did this analysis and recognized that there was a gap in the marketplace, that there was room to bring to an industry the same type of data, the same type of technology, the same type of analytics that you would see in other sectors. I thought, well, if there isn't a, you know, I used the analogy Bloomberg back then.

If there isn't a Bloomberg for commercial real estate end users, for investors and developers and brokers and lenders, there should be. There's really no reason. And so that was really the origin of the idea of creating LightBox. What we did differently than many, you know, startups is we identified that we didn't have to start from scratch.

It wasn't completely greenfield. There were companies, a few of the companies that I had some association with in the past, but others that had aspects of what I thought a total solution would need. Maybe they had some workflow solutions, maybe they had some technology, maybe they had some data, maybe they had both.

And so in an effort to build something quite comprehensive and serving the industry writ large, we started in twenty eighteen assembling those assets, those foundational things. And so we did a buy and build strategy. And so from two thousand and eighteen to two thousand and twenty-one, twenty-two, it was a, a lot about gathering capabilities and integrating capabilities and expanding upon the capabilities that were there.

And in the pro- last few years, it's actually been taking all those capabilities, spending time with customers, and building a solution that actually is the superset of all of those things that LightBox touched from eighteen to twenty-two. And that's when you can talk to a, talk to somebody and say, "Well, we support the capital markets.

We support valuation and assessment. We support location intelligence. We support, you know, all sorts of facets of real estate information because we started with a large foundation." So that's the long version. Uh, what I would describe to somebody at a cocktail party, 'cause I wouldn't say all that 'cause they would've already walked away from me.

And or probably clicked off this podcast listening to all that. The succinct version of it is there was a gap in the market. The commercial real estate industry just didn't have a, an ecosystem of vendors to support it, and that's what LightBox is. We are an information and technology company serving the real estate ecosystems.

And in fact, we're kind of four things. We're an information company. We collect a lot of data. We've helped the industry bring together a lot of the data that's been fragmented. We're also a technology company. We have to build software. We gotta build workflow. We have to build tools to enable that and to enable the distribution of that to our customers where they're operating.

We're a platform. People actually transact and connect with counterparties on our platform. If you are u- you know, used to seeing deals in the market, uh, an investment sale deal, you, chances are you're seeing it on the LightBox platform. And then we're a marketplace. Every day, literally hundreds of transactions happen on our platform where people are buying and selling goods.

There are thousands of vendors between, you know, the banks who are buying appraisal reports or a flood report or environmental site assessment or somebody coming in and buying a zoning, PZR zoning report from LightBox. We support transactions as well. So we're an information technology company, but think about it in world of data and technology and workflow and a marketplace.

Manus Clancy: I think you bring up a really important distinction between commercial real estate and everything else when it comes to the financial markets. When you're talking about a bond offering from Apple, or you're talking about looking at the stock performance of Meta, for example, you're talking about really just data.

You're talking about PEs and sales and operations and growth and advertising. In CRE, you're talking about a set of tasks with each transaction That is really unique. You have to review the zoning. You have to review the hazard risk. You may have to get a phase one or a phase two environmental study done.

It really seemed like the first four or five years of LightBox history, you really put the foundations in place to make that part of the process efficient, right? You can procure an appraisal. You talk about that marketplace within seconds in LightBox. You can get flood and greenfield and hazard data in seconds from the EDR team.

You can list your property very quickly. Talk about why that was so important to the history of LightBox. 

Eric Frank: You know, when, when we started to identify these foundational companies that we thought we could build from, they have-- were historically, you know, either kind of a technology company or a data company, and typically, they represented one side of a multi-sided market.

So for example, one of our early acquisitions was Real Capital Markets. Has still the primary position in helping brokers market their institutional properties to acquisition teams across the globe, right? That company, back when we bought it, didn't have any data, so you know, the broker would have to enter every bit of information, and the buyer was not even on, on a platform, right?

With each subsequent transaction that we did and all the buildings we've done, we've kinda combined everything together, so now everything is multi-sided, and now everything is enriched with data. So you know, tomorrow, when an institution comes in and looks at a multifamily development that's for sale, they don't have to go on that scavenger hunt which they've had to do for historically, right?

They don't have to go to five and ten different places to try and figure out the context of this deal. A lot of people will come and say, "I had to go to CoStar, and I had to go to a government website, and I went somewhere for comps, and I took the package from the broker, and I did my own desktop research, and I sent somebody out into the field," and yada, yada, yada, right?

And still, we didn't have a complete picture of what was going on because a lot of inconsistencies across that information and so forth. The role of a LightBox is to take all of that duplicative and consistent work that's important, but not the core, right? The core of the acquisition team is to understand what they're looking at, what's happening in the market, what makes sense, where would I build, or where would I buy, or how would I generate a return on this property, not how do I locate all the information I need to make a determination.

And so one of the exciting things that we hear from our customers now, looking at the LightBox Live platform, is I could tell you stories from the past where I got well down on a deal only to discover this was in an environmentally, uh, challenging area Uh, this is a place that was hard to get insurance because of fire or wind or so forth.

Now you can come to one place, you can find the deals that you're looking for. We're the Zillow equivalent of commercial real estate sales. You can get the data from the broker in terms of all that good information about the property, and now you can find everything else you need from comparables to prior transactions to the transaction data that you talk about every week on this podcast.

What's actually been buying and selling in the market? What are the zoning? What's the hazard? So, you know, it, it just makes intuitive sense, right? If I'm gonna be successful in a very competitive industry where, you know, interest rates have gotten a lot higher, there's a lot of challenge on the macro, I better have really good data.

I, I better have really up-to-date data I'm gonna need to make a good decision here, and, and it comes down to, you know, what data you have and then your own IP, right? We're not telling people what to buy and what to sell or at what price or where to build. We are an enabling company to bring the data together for you.

Dianne Crocker: I know that commercial real estate, Eric, has taken a lot of hits through the years for being kinda slow to board the commercial real estate technology train. But it... You know, I think you highlighted a really important point that a big part of that was just the fragmentation in data. You know, the fact that you couldn't easily get all the data available for 123 Main Street, and you had appraisers doing their work in a silo and, you know, the phase one providers that you just mentioned, Manus, kind of doing it on their own.

So it's exciting as an industry to think of those hubs of the wheel kind of coming together. And if we think about the, the data hunters and gatherers that you just talked about, you know, in a sense, it frees up their work. You know, it's changing processes and, and giving them hours back. 

Eric Frank: That is the quintessential role of an enabling vendor partner to the industry, right?

Is to take those repeatable tasks, take that friction out of the marketplace, get you more accurate information, get it to you in the workflow that you're, you know, involved in at, at that point in time. Commercial real estate data is incredibly fragmented from its origin, right? There are thousands of jurisdictions that, you know, have information that you need to pull together, and it's presented in a myriad of different ways and different periodicities and all sorts of things that you don't wanna worry about.

You just want to wor-- you wanna understand what's at 123 Main Street, and using that as an example, right? An address is, like, a really incomplete perspective when thinking about what's happening here, right? We hear this from our customers all the time. A lender goes and asks an, an appraisal firm for an appraisal on 123 Main Street, but it...

really what they're looking for the appraisal is on the property, and the property could be multiple parcels, multiple structures. That doesn't come off a tree somewhere, right? You have to be in the market. You have to be collecting a tremendous amount of data. You have to be at the crossroads of all the transactions that are happening, and you have to be able to determine what is a property, and that is what the bank wants an appraisal on.

They want it on all the structures, on the parking lot, and so forth. And that work is hard work, but better it's done one time on behalf of an industry than every organization in the industry try to solve that for themselves, and that's where, you know, we were in 2018, where we decided to start this business.

Manus Clancy: I wanna talk about the future of LightBox, the here and now versus the where we're gonna be maybe in three or six months, and it's kind of an open-ended question. Maybe this will lead us down a rabbit hole that'll take a lot of time. But the way I see the world right now is still very much a 1996 operation for many users.

You get an email on a listing, that email has a, a PDF. You have to go to a different landing space maybe to fill out a confidentiality form. It may take a little while to see other documents. Once you see what's in the document room, you may see a set of leases, you may see an OM, you may see an operating statement.

All of that takes time. It takes time to set up the process. It takes time to read the OM. Maybe you're, God forbid, still cutting and pasting numbers from one thing into an Argus form or something like that. You're reading a really long lease document. That feels very Bill Clinton era Operation. But it seems like we're on the cusp of enormous amounts of change.

Tell me where you think LightBox f- fits into this, this process today. 

Eric Frank: Yeah, no, that's a, that's a good observation. We're not out of the woods yet, right? One, our journey at LightBox is to take all that data and all these transactions that you're talking about, Manus, and bring them onto a single platform that every constituent, part of the constituent is logged into currently, right?

Today, you get that email from the broker with the information and so forth. Well, in July, we'll introduce LightBox Live, where instead of getting an email, you can log into your account, and you can see all of the transactions that are in the marketplace. Some number of them are public, some are by invitation.

You can sort and you can filter, and you can make sure you're seeing what you wanna see and nothing else. Secondarily, from a technology perspective, all of that data that's in the data room, and we are the data room, LightBox is the data room, has been the data room for years and years and years of most of these transactions, is now gonna be organized for you in a digitized form.

So no longer are you cutting and you're pasting, but you're gonna spend your time discerning what are the levers I'm gonna pull here, what, you know, where do I think the, uh, you know, rent growth is gonna be or the vacancy or what's gonna happen here. That lease will also be digitized for you, so you can see does the rent roll match what it says in the lease, and do I have any expiring leases.

All of those things that, you know, kinda go in, into presenting that picture for you. And further enablement using AI is a great technology, right, um, that fits right, lends itself here. You know, we talk about LightBox enabling you to make a better decision, LightBox organizing the data. Another natural enablement is using tools like AI, uh, with good data support and good technology guardrails, you can make that model faster.

You can ask it in a natural language way to produce something for you. And again, rather than every organization who doesn't have the technology resources or doesn't understand how to protect data or doesn't, you know, want to sign up for all of this, you can use this through LightBox in, in a protected and organized way.

Think about it this, this as an example. I-- today, you get an email from the broker regarding all of the changes and all the modalities that that deal is going through. Now, all of us are consumers. All of us outside of this job do normal things, right? If your wife needed to get in touch with you, is she gonna email you something, or is she gonna pick up the phone or text you on your mobile device and let you know that the time has changed for something, or you gotta get that collared shirt that you don't have any of, Manus-

or one of those things to show up at the opera on time or wherever you're going to. Our customers are sitting there in a modality where when something changes, they get an email, and that gets lost, and that doesn't get a priority. So if you're on a website, and everybody knows what it is to be on a website, when the broker has a change to a new piece of data or a new bit of information or a reminder of a deadline, you're gonna get that notification on the platform.

It only makes sense, right? This is what we're talking about. And so there is a lot of room to run here in terms of moving all the pieces of all the different constituents and all the different types of transactions that happen and, and things that happen in real estate onto the LightBox Live platform, where your counterparty is there, and you can shift from one stage of a transaction to the next stage of the transaction.

So as you know, we talk about capital markets. We talk about the broker presenting that deal over the LightBox platform. Well, the next stage typically is financing, and we have hundreds of banks on another LightBox software solution, so now they're on the platform. And you can picture just inviting the bank into the process at the appropriate time and the data being in the data room in the right way, and then the bank can organize the due diligence because all the due diligence providers and the history of that site are on the platform.

And you can see how things get more efficient, and then people can spend their time thinking about their intellectual property. How do I become a better developer? How do I become a better, uh, portfolio manager? How do I become a better risk manager now that I have more time in my day to do those things and less time futzing around with information and communication?

Manus Clancy: I think you brought up just a tremendous point here that I, I think can't be underscored enough that for the last forty years in CRE, the winners and the losers have been separated by the efficiency with which they run. You know, we go back to the eighties, people are still typing contracts. We go to the nineties, people were still using faxes.

And then we go to the, the two thousands, people were still calling up one another to get appraisals set up. I think this is as big a linchpin era as we've ever seen. I think people are gonna look back on this in three years and say to their next generation of CRE types, "You're not gonna believe how many times or how many hours I spent per day reading an email, or how I had to go to s-- 11 different sites to get the data I needed, or I would have to sit down for ninety minutes to read a lease."

Talk about that for just a second, that, you know, you're at the forefront of technology. You love talking about technology. You love the possibilities that it brings to the table. I mean, I just feel like we're going from the FedEx world to the email world in the next three years, and it's gonna be life-changing.

Eric Frank: You know, Manus, you know, for, for all of us, you know, going back to that consumer analogy before, we're used to a way of working when, you know, you're probably not spending as much time on Amazon as I am or other places, right? But, but you know what, what is a good user experience. You know what your expectations are for the immediacy of information or immediacy of a product or immediacy of a response, right?

You have that expectation in almost everything you do nowadays. It is that, right? You got a self-driving car or whatever, right? Why are some of these things left behind for no good reason, right? And so the user in the commercial real estate ecosystem, whether you're need data or you need a transaction or, or whatever it is you need, should have the same expectation of simplicity and efficiency, and that I can rely upon a third party to take care of the reducing the friction, the duplication, the connecting of all the data, bringing the deal to me to my front door, enabling me to communicate instantly with my counterparty.

That's-- that should be table stakes, right? That's not where the, the, where the real innovation, the creativity. You know, when they, you know, they do the best deal in twenty twenty-seven, it's not gonna have anything to do with technology and LightBox. It's gonna be the group of, of developers or brokers or whatever who put together a structure and a construct to enable something really wonderful to happen in a con-- in a financially challenged environment.

And if we can play a small part by making the data at your fingertips, everything you need at your fingertips, and technology to support better decisioning Using your ideas and your relationships and your knowledge and your mandate as an organization, that's the role of a strong vendor in the marketplace, and that's what we mean, mean to be, and we're happy to, you know, be in the background doing that.

But everybody needs it. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah. Agree. Good point. Manus, I have to say, you just reminded me of something that you told me years ago, Eric, that just kind of stuck in my head, and it had to do with AI and, and reading leases. And you said, I don't know if you remember, but that no one really goes to college dreaming of reading these lease abstracts or pulling data points out of these static- Yeah

PDF appraisal reports. I wanna lean in on the AI topic because it obviously dominates every conversation I know that I have with folks in the industry. We did a benchmark survey. We got some interesting findings. Some are coming high up on the learning curve quickly. Others are, you know, lagging a little bit and being more cautious.

Some companies already have guidance on how to use it responsibly, and others don't. If somebody asked you what you think the biggest misconception is about AI, what would you say? 

Eric Frank: I think people think that it's like this panacea that you can immediately build software and you could, you know, build something to replicate whatever it is that you're paying somebody for somewhere.

And if you ask it a question, you're gonna get a great, and great answer that's reliable. And I think both of those, you know, have issues associated with them. The world didn't just put information on the internet when ChatGPT came to the fore. That information was sitting out there. And the reason people weren't using that information was because it wasn't reliable information.

It didn't become reliable because the interface is better and it got it for you faster, and it located something that you didn't have to go click the blue link on. I hear all the time, like, you know, software is dead and all those kind of things and so forth. And I think in this industry, if you're in real estate, you're not a technology company.

You're a developer or you're a lender or you're a broker or you're an asset manager or a combination of various parts of all of those things, right? And you should use your vendor ecosystem, your trusted partners, to bring you the capabilities you need to be more efficient with those things. And AI is awesome, but AI doesn't have all the answers.

Manus Clancy: I wanna bring up something that's very near and dear to my heart. When you talk about misconceptions, one of the misconceptions might be that there's a little bit of a vaporware sense to AI. Yes, you can get answers to things now, but it's not really productionalized at this point, right? It, it's a thing that needs to be developed, needs to be matured, needs to ripen.

But we've taken something here at LightBox that was... I, I, I'm very proud of as an organization. We have 1,200 banks that order from us, through us, um, almost a quarter million appraisals per year, so we're talking about huge numbers of this thing. Eric, I know that we've built a service for the industry that really applies AI with all of the guardrails, with all of the data protections in place, with all of the redundancies, and it's not vaporware.

It's actually out in the market now. Let me give you a chance to talk about that for a second and, and what that journey was like. 

Eric Frank: We're very customer-led, and you know, you talk about the volume. This is still a very paper-intense industry, right? Whether it's an appraisal report, a zoning report, a property condition assessment, a phase one environmental report, and our customers are sitting on troves of the, of these documents, right?

And what they really want is to capture the insight inside of the document, right? I wanna build-- I wanna be able to look at my portfolio. I wanna look at my loans. I want to, before I make a loan, know what I've done in the past and what are the rele-relevant benchmarks. So the banks have said to us, "Could you actually pull those figures out of, out of a report?"

It actually started earlier than that when the banks were asking their appraisers to actually give them a digital copy to go along with the PDF document. And that was a very difficult ask because there were so many different requirements and different banks. I think we deal with, on behalf of our banks on our network, three thousand appraisal firms, so not everybody has the size and the scale to do all those things.

So what we did was we looked at those appraisal reports, and we used machine learning, and we used AI, and we used other technologies. And today we're lifting out at a very high degree of accuracy and with a human in the loop, six hundred or so data points out of each one of these reports. And a bank doesn't want an approximation of what's in the report.

They want what's in the report because they're doing their appra-appraisal review and so forth. And so if you just take that report and throw it into a, a OpenAI or Claude or whatever, you're gonna get out of those six hundred, maybe you'll get five hundred of those data fields reasonably accurate. But the other hundred, which are probably the more interesting ones, aren't coming back that way.

So you have to build training models and technologies and ground truth and experimentation to get to an output that is, is useful to deliver accuracy to our customers. And we'll just go from document type A to B to C until we have all that. But then the bank has this great trove of data. And unsurprisingly, the next thing the bank says to us is like, "I'm not a technology area in the bank.

I'm not well supported necessarily. Can you organize that data for me? Can you give it to me in a And a workflow tool that I can actually look at it. Can I see some benchmarking across the customer base? So that's all exciting things that lead from there. But accuracy is most important, and I think the noise in this industry, it doesn't take much to start up a company anymore, which is amazing, right?

And AI has generated many, many startups, and there's just a lot of noise. Every day there's another solution to help the acquisition team underwrite and to do this and do that. But it, it's not the same as, "Hey, I'm getting the data. I'm getting it connected to all of the other real property data from somebody I trust.

It's happening in my workflow. Like, I don't have to go and ship this data somewhere else. It's on my desk." There's a lot of noise in this industry, and it, you know, it, it, it just makes us need to be m- sharper and more clear with our customers what the difference is between just an off-the-shelf model and thr- shoving something at it and doing business with somebody who's connecting the data and cleaning the data and making sure it's accurate and protected.

But, you know, that's, uh, that's for our salespeople to, to to help people understand. 

Manus Clancy: Well, the imagery for me with the appraisal process until recently, until very recently, was the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. For me, an appraisal goes into that two-by-four box. They nail it shut. 

Eric Frank: We're 

Manus Clancy: seeing it- They stick it into the digital- 

Eric Frank: Right

Manus Clancy: file cabinet, and nobody ever sees it again. 

Eric Frank: No. 

Manus Clancy: I think only in the last two years have people been using this data to inform other appraisers, capital markets, lenders, originators, risk managers. But before then, it was Harrison Ford chasing some guy down the steps of some- You know what? ... uh, brutalist building in Washington, DC.

No, and it's, it's 

Eric Frank: so true. And look, our customers, they get the appraisal in, and they download it, and they review it. And then it's on Suzy's desk or Mary's, or, and then they can't find in the future, right? W- we take these documents, we connect it to the transaction, we connect it geospatially to a location, we give them the interface that they can find, find these things.

It's just, it's a solution, right? It's not just pulling data out of a document. 

Dianne Crocker: It's really exciting. It's opening up a really exciting chapter for commercial real estate. I wanna go back to something that you mentioned earlier, Manus. On the topic of natural hazards, you know, it seems like data about a property's exposure to things like, um, wildfires or flooding or, you know, myriad other natural hazards is getting talked about more, is getting more attention.

Sometimes a natural hazard might impact a property owner's ability to get insurance, or the insurance could be exorbitantly expensive. And so, um, I know that we've rolled in data along those lines into the LightBox Live offering. And as you're out there talking to investors, I'm wondering, you know, are some of them seeing this data at a property level for the first time?

And if so, how are they reacting to it? 

Eric Frank: Yeah, it's interesting. So, you know, we, we are the leading provider of the data that goes into a phase one site assessment, so we have all the underlying assets. We have city directories and fire maps, Sanborn fire maps, and Historical imagery and topographic, all, all things that only an engineer cares about.

But all of that comes together and, and we bring that together, we walk it back in time, we geospatially connect it to parcels and, and property, and we can now bring that information at a screened level to, to the investor. And so the investor is looking at a deal and can get a sense, because this is all about timing and cost.

Is environmental gonna be a factor that I need to take into consideration for timing and cost of getting my deal done? So we're not solving for the answer, is there an environmental issue here? We're not writing a phase one report. We're not an engineering firm. But we can take the information that we have about that property and the adjoining properties and give you an indication of whether there's risk here, and there's ways to do that without coming on the site and doing the full site inspection.

And so investors are clearly identifying, they're coming-- they're going through our, our demo now, and they're seeing, oh, I absolutely can count on my hands the number of times where I got surprised by an environmental issue coming into l- into a later stage in, in the deal construct. Now I know upfront that there's something here I can build into my model.

I know what the cost is gonna be. I can extend my timetable for two weeks. The lenders say the same thing. I can manage the borrower's expectation because now I know that environmental can become an issue. And so again, it's taking the information we have, putting in context for whoever that audience is, and the nice thing about the platform is so much of the platform is consistent from end user persona, right?

Everybody is looking at properties. Everybody is doing research. Everybody is trying to understand valuation. Everybody's trying to understand where other activity is taking place. Everybody is trying to figure out How am I gonna differentiate myself in this industry? And by looking at information in a connected way that's comprehensive, that's accurate, looking at the deals.

We have a view now that, Manus, you were very a-active in doing, called Market View, where for the first time we're surfacing. You can come onto the platform, and you can see basically what's happening, what transactions are happening in the market, what is for sale, how-- what's the velocity of these things?

Who was the buyer? Who was the seller? What other properties do these folks own? What other transaction has this broker been involved with? We are just taking the information that's been inside of all of these LightBox capabilities that were siloed at one point in time, enriching them, connecting them, and presenting them, and then our customers are go- gonna figure out, "How do I use that in a way to make a better decision?"

And if they're doing that, and they have more time, and they can do things faster, and they can avoid mistakes, then we've done our job as, as a partner. And, and that's what we're here to do. We're not here to change the way people do things or disrupt the marketplace. We're here to help the market work the way they wanna work with critical information and critical workflow and critical technology, but take the burden off of hundreds and put it onto one organization who that's all we focus on is that.

We're gonna do that better than anybody, and then you're gonna do your job better than anybody because you have the time to do your job, which is not to collect data. 

Manus Clancy: I, I have a thesis, and I'd love to get both of your reactions to this, and that is that people have really cared about hazard for a long time, and what has stopped them has been time, that they're spending so much time reading leases, so much time manipulating operating statements, so much time reading OMs, but also so much time trying to aggregate data that was really hard to get.

And I really think that the dividend that people will find over the next couple years will allow them to step into things like this. Like you said a moment ago, people don't wanna know just if a dry cleaner was on my property ten years ago. They wanna know how close was the nearest dry cleaner, and is there a possibility that I can get contamination from, you know, a half a mile away, things like that.

And that's a really hard thing to do in twenty-twenty that I think in twenty-twenty-seven becomes not so hard. And I think the people that embrace this, the money managers, the REITs, the portfolio managers that, that utilize this time wisely will be the operational And return winners over the next decade 

Eric Frank: Yeah, I mean, one area that we haven't touched on yet, which is really, really important, is something that we had to build for ourselves.

Most of our customers have been in this industry for a long time and have an incredibly deep set of information about transactions that they've been part of, about relationships that they have, about buildings that they've bought or they've sold or they've developed or they've underwritten or whatever it is.

They've got loans, they've got all sorts of information, counterparty information, all this stuff. And to our company, they are all struggling to actually be able to use that information because they don't have a way of concording that together and saying, "Information in this database and information on this transaction and information over here actually related to the same property."

And why is that? Because they don't-- there's no secret decoder ring of what a property is. They have a transaction record that says, 'I did something at one, two, three, something or other." And in another database, it's called something, or it has a parcel number on it. And another database is something else.

And so one of the services that LightBox had to build for themselves is for us to connect all the information we now make available to our customers. So our customer can actually take all of that information, all that great history that they have, resolve it to what we call the LightBox ID. So at a unique ID for a building, for a property, for a parcel, for a person, for a deal, and using that ID schema, they can now bring their data, connect their data, and understand what, what information they have for themselves.

That's the same data that's been used in governments that we sell to and technology companies that we sell to, and telecom companies. People want location intelligence. They want to know about every single building and everything about it, and all of the attributes and everything around it. And we do that by creating an ID and then mapping it to all of this other content.

So a big part of the industry being able to move forward and to become more analytical and to use their own assets is to be able to connect them to something, and that is a big part of our solution as well. And the biggest organizations are, are using that for the first time, being able to say, "I know across our company what a property is, and when we create a new record, we're using that ID scheme to create a new record.

So we're not creating more things to clean up in the future. We're starting fresh." So There's a lot of excitement, I think, Manus, in the industry. These things are not top of mind when you're getting ready to bid on a building. It's not top of mind when you're lending. It's not top of mind when you're trying to get that next building mandate to sell as a broker.

I totally understand that. And a lot of these concepts are kind of probably went over people's head listening to this. The point is they're important. I think they understand data's important, workflow is important, understanding the data across all the different types of data you need to make a good decision, and knowing that you're all talking about the same property is important.

And knowing that there's a vendor out there who has a solution that is purposely built for this and just for this is an open, uh, vendor, meaning you can get our data, you can put it where you wanna put it, you can use it in your products. That's where the industry, uh, gap has been, and that's why we're playing catch up.

Dianne Crocker: I don't know, Manus. I think we're gonna have to have Eric back to talk about the back end. You know, so much of what we've talked about involves deals, the underwriting, what you think about before you extend a loan. But what you just touched on is exciting as well, which is it gives users a more holistic way to do things like portfolio risk management, to interact with data, you know, to filter it based on what their own risk profiles are, which are very different across commercial real estate.

We could talk all day about this, but we are coming close to the end, and so we're gonna throw you a softball here, Eric, to close it out. 

Eric Frank: Oh, those, those weren't softballs? All 

Dianne Crocker: right. Shoot. The passion definitely came through, which I loved. So as CEO of LightBox, what do you think makes the company special or different as an organization?

What keeps you happy coming to work every day? 

Eric Frank: You know, it's fun. What we're doing I think is fun. We know what our mission is. Like, you, you know, we've all come together Because we've all identified that this is-- real estate is an exciting industry to be part of. We've all identified, because back to this consumer analogy, whatever analogy you wanna make, that there's no reason that this industry can't be modernized, can't be improved, can't be innovated upon.

We realize that there's a gap, and we realize that we're appreciated. You know, our customers like talking to us. Our customers like what we're doing. We've assembled, you know, five hundred or so people that are passionate about real estate, and they bring different skills. Some are in the technology world.

Some are very data-oriented. Some are working on analytics. Some are working and have a passion for customer service. Some are passionate about marketing. Some are passionate about analyzing and understanding and sharing that with our customers. And it's a great industry. It has so much room to grow. We're in the early innings of this.

And positioning yourself as a partner, not somebody... You know, there's so many of these things that pop up all the time that are disruptors. I'm gonna come up with a way to automate valuation, and you won't need any more appraisers. Or I'm gonna come up with a way to automate underwriting, and you can auto-automatically underwrite a deal, and you don't need an analyst.

Or I'm gonna come up a way where you're gonna automate who's the best buyer for this building, and you-- we're just gonna m-match them magically on the platform. I mean, all that's bullshit, right? What it comes down to is there's a group of amazing professionals that know their art, and they need a partner that can support them and help them grow And be there, be responsive to, you know, things like AI.

Be responsive to, we need new data sets. Be responsive to, you know, hey, data centers are really hot. Can you go out and map the electrical power grid and the substations on top of all the layers of information you have so I can better do site selection because this is really important to us now? And it's fun to be in that position.

It's fun to build a business. We don't take ourself too seriously, just like you guys on the podcast. You share great information, and then, you know, you, you giggle about things 'cause we're just part of a bigger, a bigger ecosystem, but I think we play an important role. Most people don't know who, who we are 'cause we sat in the background, right?

Most of the people that have been buying properties for the last 10 years have been buying it from looking at emails in the da- in the data room that's LightBox. We don't, we don't pound our chest and put that out in front of you. We're representing CBRE and that broker and making sure it gets to you, and you efficiently can do that transaction.

That's what gets us excited, and so the name isn't, isn't so obvious to people, but, you know, after this podcast, they'll be talking about it. 

Dianne Crocker: You'll be getting job applications from people who wanna work with you. 

Eric Frank: We do. So- Great. Please send them in. More... It's just a people business, right? This is... We're not stamping out widgets.

Manus Clancy: So we usually end with a slice of life. We'll make it a quick one today- Oh, please ... Eric. It's a happy time, not just for LightBox. It's a happy time for Knick fans these days. 

Eric Frank: Oh y- oh, yes. 

Manus Clancy: So in, uh, a couple of seconds, give me your prediction for the NBA championship- Knicks in six ... which starts Wednesday night.

I know you're a big Knick fan. Knicks in 

Eric Frank: six. Knicks in six. Knicks in 

Manus Clancy: six. I love it. 

Eric Frank: Look, I think we've got... I mean, they're playing fantastic, right? What cohesion. I, I mean, they have done things over the last 11 or 12 games that haven't been seen much before Look, Wemby is unbelievable, right? I mean, I'd be scared to be on the court with him.

Hopefully Mitch, his finger is good. But they're young and they're a little bit less experienced than the Knicks are. We've got a good coach who's been there. And the players, these guys have won before, right? They've won in the NCAA. They seem to be coming together at the right time. The Garden will be rocking, and if we all win the lottery someday, we'll get a seat.

Manus Clancy: That's 

Eric Frank: right. But go Knicks go. 

Dianne Crocker: Well, Eric, first your team won the NCAA March Madness, and now the Knicks might 

Eric Frank: take it all. Get a couple in there. Yeah. 

Manus Clancy: It's been a good couple of years. A, a UM football title, a UM basketball title, 

Eric Frank: and maybe we'll get- Well, I'm not a big fan, so it all balances out, Manus. I mean- There 

Manus Clancy: we go

Eric Frank: you can't have everything. Yeah. Well, that- This is fun, guys. Thank you. I hope it was informative for our audience. 

Dianne Crocker: Definitely was. That brings us to the end of this special edition. Thank you, Eric. We learn something every time we connect with you. Hopefully our listeners did too. And thanks also to our producers at Bruyning Media.

Be sure to join us each week as we break down CRE news and data in context. You can listen on all your favorite podcast platforms and send your comments or questions to podcast@lightboxre.com. As always, thank you for listening, and have a great weekend. 

Manus Clancy: Let's go