The Deal Engine
Common Assets is the finder + connector for cashflowing real estate. The Deal Engine is what makes the finding part work: a data-intelligence system that takes messy real-estate data in and pushes ranked, underwritten, explained opportunities out the other side.
Raw real-estate data is a commodity. PropStream, ATTOM, and Reonomy all resell the same county records to anyone with a credit card. Buying that data is table stakes, not an edge.
The honest edge
Three things, and only three things, separate us from a $99/mo data subscription:
- Better models — valuation, rent, and motivation-to-sell scoring that beats off-the-shelf accuracy in the markets we actually work.
- The closed loop — we don't stop at leads. We underwrite, fund, track the outcome, and feed the result back. That compounds. → following-the-money
- Focus — we don't try to score every property in America. We pick where to hunt, then mine hard inside that lane.
- Models tuned on real outcomes, not generic priors
- Underwrite → fund → track → recalibrate
- Every funded deal sharpens the next score
- Specialized to our markets and our buy-box
- Same county records everyone else rents
- Static — no feedback, no learning
- Generic scores tuned for no one
- Resold to every competitor identically
The two-stage funnel
The strategy has a shape. You don't analyze every house in the country — you decide where to hunt, then mine what's inside. Top-down picks the battlefield; bottom-up picks the targets.
The closed loop is the moat
Every deal we underwrite and fund produces an outcome — real rent collected, real rehab spent, real sale closed. That outcome doesn't just sit in a ledger. It feeds back and recalibrates every model that touched the deal.
Six months in, our scoring is tuned on our deals in our markets. No off-the-shelf tool can replicate that, because no off-the-shelf tool gets to see whether its own predictions came true. The data engine and the capital engine train each other.
Where the edge concentrates
Not every part of this system is precious. Knowing which parts are commodity and which parts are the moat keeps the build honest and the priorities right.
- Commodity (already built): data ingestion and the underwriting math. The economics are a stored procedure, not a vibe — see Research Pipeline.
- The edge (where we invest): the models (valuation, rent, motivation), the learning loop, and the off-market motivation score.
The build order follows the edge: stand it up on free public data first, beat Zillow on accuracy in one market, then scale to the next lane.
Where to go next
- the-intelligence-layer — the architecture: how the six layers fit together.
- signals-and-data — what we actually mine and compute.
- the-plays — the strategies the engine feeds.
- kpis-and-reports — how we measure the engine and what it emits.