Avison Young Acquires Truss

Avison Young announced it has acquired the intellectual property and other select assets of proptech firm Truss. 

Truss is an online marketplace designed to help small and medium-sized business owners find, tour and lease coworking or office space. The company takes all of the market options for a tenant and aggregates them in “one place and one view,” according to an earlier interview with co-founder Tom Smith.

Avison Young will expand that platform to further digitize commercial real estate leasing and sales processes for clients.

“We don’t believe in standalone proptech because our clients want the Avison Young service,” Avison Young CEO Mark Rose tells GlobeSt.com. “We’re taking the IP [intellectual property] of Truss, and it will be customized for our client base and tied into all of the other investments we’ve made in AVANT, which is our data platform and our flex office platform. This is taking transactional services to the next level.”

Avison Young’s global intelligence platform, AVANT by Avison Young, houses data that its experts translate into insights and actionable insights for clients. 

“Every service company and, quite frankly, product company around the world has mechanized and digitized their workflow products and services,” Rose says. “Our industry has been slower to do that. What we want to do is transform our human resources from Excel spreadsheets and PDF readers to having a system that’s 24/7 real-time for our clients and us.”

Rose says the Truss system will help provide information to run predictive analysis around locations with the highest education levels and best logistics and transportation systems. “We now have the ability to provide information for not just today, but more importantly, to predict the next five, 10 and 25 years,” he says.

With the acquisition, Avison Young welcomes Truss’ software engineers, data scientists, digital analysts and brokers to its team. Truss founder, Bobby Goodman, will join Avison Young as a principal to assist with integrating its tools into the firm’s operations.

While there aren’t upsides to the COVID-19 situation, Rose says it has prompted Avison Young to transform its business at a faster rate than it would have otherwise. 

“That’s why you’ve seen major investments at a period of time when people are retrenching and spending time on how they hold down the fort,” Rose says. “That was the very time where we launched AVANT, brought in the consulting groups that tie to digitizing the consulting process and brought in the Truss assets and their people to continue to digitize.”