Market Data for Everyone

In today’s affordable housing sector, stakeholders navigate a complex landscape of analytics and bureaucratic processes to identify and capitalize on tax credit opportunities. The shifting landscape requires expertise in data analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), environmental and infrastructural impact, permitting processes, and federal, state, and local tax credit programs. While there is no substitute for human expertise, the web of issues can be as vast as it is opaque, creating a growing need for technology that clarifies the process rather than further complicating it.

Curvin Leatham encountered these obstacles firsthand during his 12 years in the financial services sector, where he worked on lending and technical development at PNC Financial Services. He is now the CEO of Ribbon Demographics, which was founded in 2004 by Julia LaVigne to streamline the process of obtaining, analyzing, and presenting demographic data for the housing sector. Leatham and LaVigne met at a conference in 2017.

“Julia always had the idea of moving from an Excel-based system to an online platform. And I’m happy that she trusted me in that regard,” Leatham says as he outlines the use cases of the RibbonOS platform, aimed at market analysts, developers, and financiers. “What we’ve done is create an online platform where they can pull all this information on one software application.” Following the acquisition of Ribbon in 2024, Leatham hired software engineers Vanessa Rupertus and Lubna Fatima to spearhead this change in operations. Vanessa built the GIS platform from scratch, and Lubna cultivated the externalities of a community to storyboard access to goods and services.

Realizing New Efficiencies in Demographic Analysis
Leatham described the lengthy process typically undertaken by analysts and appraisers. “They used to spend hours researching information, such as neighborhood amenities, property comps, flood zones, building permits filed…and then they had to run a demand analysis to determine if the proposed development project, based off a unit mix that was presented to them, made sense for that market or that primary market area.”

Such time- and resource-intensive processes often overwhelm smaller firms, Leatham says, and can span across days, particularly when multiple projects arrive at the firm’s inbox simultaneously. With software like RibbonOS, he says that the collection of data and initial generation of demand analyses could be completed in a matter of minutes.

Making these processes less cumbersome does not just make the process easier, Leatham adds. “It reduces the learning curve as well.”

“If you were to grow your firm as a market analyst or appraiser, you’d have to sit down with the junior talent and train them up for a couple of weeks on navigating these systems. With our system, you don’t have to spend as much time. It’s plug and play,” he says.

Leatham says that firms can leverage the software’s efficiencies regardless of their current stage of growth. “[Analysts] may not have had the capacity to enter the fourth, fifth, or sixth market, or to go national, but now they can, because now they can develop capacity without having to hire a lot of people.” For firms aiming to slow their pace, the software can also reduce the burdens of downsizing operations, he says. “The system allows them to produce a quality third-party report by themselves, without having to spend a lot of time collecting information.”

“An Ingredient in the Special Sauce”
Ribbon’s processing advancements were made possible partly by the decreasing costs of datacenter space. “It’s more entry-level now for folks who are trying to build applications, whether it’s testing or deploying applications on the market,” Leatham says. “When we started toying around with this back in 2019, the cost to run our system was maybe 1.5 times what it is now.”

More critical than server costs is the source of the data being processed. Rather than owning it outright, Ribbon partners with numerous third-party data providers to aggregate and synthesize market and demographic data. Their leading partner is Claritas, LLC, a Cincinnati-based marketing technology firm. “We focus on what we can control at Ribbon,” Leatham explains.

“We’re providing an ingredient in their special sauce,” says Steve Mehnert, vice president for channel partners at Claritas. “Ribbon’s special sauce is to combine the data we provide with other data and provide an endpoint platform for clients. It’s really positioned for people who need to get the insights and the answers, but don’t have a lot of the GIS skills that would otherwise get them there.”

Mehnert adds that the collaboration is as natural for Claritas, which partners directly with the U.S. Census Bureau, as it is for Ribbon. “We don’t go to the level that Ribbon does to serve this market,” he says. “The people that are either building, owning, or operating the housing need to make educated decisions about where they will invest for those housing needs…Ribbon brings to the table other important things, including niche services such as building plans and permitting. Claritas is not in that business, and that’s why a partnership with somebody [like Ribbon] makes so much sense.”

Lived Experience Essential in an Increasingly Automated Space
Ribbon Demographics is, of course, one of many players in the growing market data sector. Leatham says that combining various data partnerships ensures that they do not encounter industry monoliths. Many of these companies utilize artificial intelligence to enhance their speed and efficiency.

“We bring in HelloData.ai, a third-party partner we work with for the rental information; that’s what they do best. Another partner on the affordable housing side is a company called Statval. They provide us with operating expense data on affordable housing properties across the country, and that information comes directly from Fannie and Freddie.” With its toolkit specifically designed for affordable housing professionals, Leatham aims to see the software utilized to increase the nation’s affordable housing stock.

Making sense of such a vast inventory of data to create a simple end-user product is a challenge – one that Mehnert says can be simplified somewhat with Artificial Intelligence (AI), a feature of Ribbon’s platform that speeds up the otherwise time-intensive process of generating a demand analysis or identifying tax credit opportunities.

With these new capabilities, however, come new responsibilities. Cort Irish, marketing lead at Claritas, says that human supervision of AI modeling is essential to prevent such algorithms from driving market stakeholders toward predatory practices.

“AI can help us optimize campaigns in real time based on audience behaviors, conversions, and things of that nature. But with that, there’s a human element involved to make sure that certain things are maintained,” Irish says. “You’ve got to be hands-on with AI. Yes, it can replace some of the things humans are doing faster, but that doesn’t mean humans can’t be involved.”

The proliferation of AI within the world of housing market data has not come without controversy. A 2022 feature by the nonprofit investigative outlet ProPublica reported that the housing market data giant RealPage was enabling anti-competitive rent-setting practices through its YieldStar program. (In a 2022 statement to ProPublica, RealPage maintained that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner,” and has since repeatedly denied that it enables anticompetitive market behavior.)

A flurry of state and federal antitrust investigations ensued. A proposed final judgment published by the Department of Justice on January 30, 2025, ordered Atlanta-based Cortland Management to cease its use of RealPage’s demand analysis products, finding that their use of the software facilitated anticompetitive practices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Some legal experts have questioned the strength of the antitrust claims; several other actions against RealPage and some of their clients remain pending.

Leatham is hopeful that Ribbon will not face the same obstacles. Mehnert adds that human supervision is as much an ethical concern as a technical one; absent greater clarity from regulators, human input remains vital.

“AI will be used in every use case until someone says no,” Mehnert says.