M/PF Research Expands

"This is the one (acquisition) that takes us from the development to putting it into practice," Greg Willett, vice president for the Carrollton-based M/PF Research, tells GlobeSt.com. The acquisition of the RE-Opt, a revenue optimization system, was under negotiation for six months. RE-Opt had 11 employees at sale time.

RE-Opt's president Jeffrey Roper will assume management responsibility for M/PF Research. He will relocate to Dallas in the future.

The RE-Opt proprietary platform runs variables for unit pricing and strategies to help determine rents and market conditions. "To some degree, it's a crystal ball," Willett says. "It's where the industry is headed for large players. People have been talking about this for years." The system will be seeded with M/PF data and will interface will all popular property management programs.

In a press release, Roper explains RE-Opt helps owners "better anticipate spikes and valleys in demand" to adjust per unit pricing as well as track the competition. "The results produced by this pricing system reach a whole new level of sophistication when you merge in statistics from M/PF's vast database, which shows the impact of pricing on demand performances in nearly 60 metropolitan areas over more than 10 years," he adds.

Willett says the strategy bundles RE-Opt with YieldStar, bought in 2002, and Real Wizard, acquired last year. The new direction doesn't impact M/PF's quarterly publications, regional conferences or Multi-Housing Outlook, a forecast of market fundamentals produced in conjunction with Torto Wheaton Research.

"By combining M/PF Research and RE-Opt, we've brought together some of the very best minds in the multifamily sector into a large organization with the commitment and resources to make a profound impact on the industry," Steve Winn, RealPage's CEO, says in the release. RealPage provides property management products and services to more than 20,000 multifamily communities in the US.