When a group of friends working in real estate investment noticed a gap in the service offering in the industry, the idea of starting a company began to take shape.
Traditionally, the market has catered to small investors or large institutional players, but the middle segment—professional investors with around 50-500 apartments—has been underserved. treco was founded to provide this target group with result-oriented and comprehensive property asset management, and advisory services related to housing and the real estate market.
treco’s CEO, Nikodemus Nousiainen, explains that the company seeks to differentiate itself from others by genuinely adopting a customer-centric model. Instead of a commission structure based on individual transactions and encourages quick deals, treco’s fees are linked to developing its client’s portfolio performance. This fee model motivates to development of clients’ portfolios, ensuring that all parties benefit.
"Opportunities exist in every market situation, as long as you manage the associated risks."
From the very beginning, data utilisation became a central part of treco’s operations.
“It was clear that data is part of our identity and needs to be at the core of our decisions,” says Nousiainen.
In the traditionally conservative real estate sector, Nousiainen sees data utilisation as a key element of treco’s competitive edge. As an example, he points to the brokerage industry, where pricing is often based on intuition and local knowledge. While these factors can certainly be important in decision-making, decisions should also be based on data and market trends.
“We can tell our clients that our decisions and recommendations are primarily based on data, not just streams of thought,” says Nousiainen.
As treco’s team began exploring accessible data sources suited to their needs, CHAOS’ solution came into the picture. CHAOS integrates data from numerous sources into one platform, making it easy for real estate investors to analyse and use it for decision-making.
treco leverages the transparency and precision provided by data, particularly in rental pricing and predicting trends in the housing market. The most important tool treco’s team uses on a weekly, sometimes daily basis is the rental data CHAOS provides. It assists in pricing across different regions, taking into account seasonal variations and minimising the number of vacant months.
“These kinds of features are especially important in rental brokerage, where proper pricing helps avoid vacant months, which in these portfolios can accumulate to thousands of euros,” Nousiainen explains.
In addition to its core business, treco also produces various analyses, such as regional analyses, for its clients. Here, CHAOS’ demographic data, trends, and forecasts play a vital role. Understanding local housing markets and underlying factors such as migration, population, and employment helps clients make successful investment decisions.
"We can tell our clients that our decisions and recommendations are primarily based on data, not just streams of thought"
Despite the turbulence in the real estate market in recent years, Nousiainen remains confident about the future. The industry is cyclical, and although the current times are challenging, there is light ahead.
“Opportunities exist in every market situation, as long as you manage the associated risks. Even in this situation, we can look positively toward the future,” Nousiainen summarises.
treco continues to successfully serve real estate investors in the current market, where efficient cash flow management and optimising net returns are critical.
With the market now defined and growing trust from industry players, treco aims to become the clear leader in its segment within the next five years. Leveraging accurate data and insightful analyses will be crucial for reaching this goal and enabling informed decision-making.
Data is everywhere and the amount of data has been increasing exponentially. Still, many businesses rely on old-fashioned measures or base their business decisions on gut feelings instead of data.
What should be considered when investing in real estate? How to become a pioneer, developer and inventor? How to stay ahead of the game and create permanent, sustainable and user-oriented investments that guarantee a stable cash flow? Data and technological tools can be harnessed to solve this equation.
Multiple survey results and reports published during recent years indicate that the majority of executives in the RE industry now believe that harnessing the potential of big data and AI offers a huge competitive advantage But how far are we in the transformation process? Has the industry unlocked the full potential of data, advanced analytics, and AI?
