RCKRBX CEO Michael Broder explains how the same predictive modeling that wins elections is now telling developers exactly what renters want, sometimes 48 months before a building even opens.
Real estate has always been a backward-looking industry. Developers look at what got built last cycle, how it leased up, what the comps did, and they build a version of that again. Michael Broder, CEO and co-founder of RCKRBX, thinks that’s exactly the wrong direction to be looking, and he’s got the receipts from a career spent doing the opposite in a much higher-stakes arena: political campaigns.
I had Michael on Deconstructing Data to talk about how demand-side data is changing real estate marketing, and honestly, hearing where this methodology actually came from was the most interesting part.
What Is Demand-Side Data in Real Estate, and Why Doesn’t It Already Exist?
Michael’s path here is unusual. He spent the first part of his career running close to 30 political campaigns, congressional, gubernatorial, US Senate, including a stint in the first Bush administration. After the 1998 cycle, he took that political research playbook and started applying it to commercial industries through a firm called Bright Line Strategies. Real estate found him, not the other way around, right around the 2008 financial crisis.
“There was no real effective tool or mechanism to ultimately assess how those properties and the tenancies within them would ultimately perform… generally speaking, the industry has not really leveraged voice-of-the-customer consumer data insights to inform decisions.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
That gap became the business. RCKRBX builds statistically representative samples down to the census tract, in some cases zip-plus-four, then runs primary audience research paired with secondary data to predict what renters will want in a specific building, in a specific market, months or years before it delivers.
“Unlike most polling, which gives you insights on a moment in time in terms of what people are thinking, our data is actually looking forward. It’s not about what is happening today. It’s what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
That’s a genuinely different posture than most of the industry. Most real estate data answers “what happened.” RCKRBX is built to answer “what’s about to happen,” which matters enormously when a development takes 18 months to 3 years to deliver.
How Do You Predict Rental Performance Before a Building Is Even Built?
This is where the pandemic broke the old playbook. Developers used to baseline unit mix and rent rates off recent comps. Michael’s point is that the comps themselves stopped meaning anything once remote work and the housing affordability gap changed who’s renting and why.
“Ever since the pandemic took hold, what happens today is so different in terms of the demands and needs of renters than pre-pandemic… you really need to be able to look not through a rearview mirror, but through your windshield.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
The practical result is a shift in how developers should be thinking about density. It used to be simple math: more units, more revenue. Michael’s data says that’s no longer true.
“It used to be density equals dollars. And in today’s world, it’s demand that equals dollars.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
Fewer units, correctly sized and configured for what the local market actually wants, routinely outperforms a higher unit count that’s misaligned with demand. That’s a hard thing to sell to a developer who’s used to running the old math, but it’s borne out in the net operating income numbers RCKRBX tracks.
How Does Political Microtargeting Apply to Leasing a Building?
This is the part that stuck with me most. Michael described exactly how a “get out the vote” operation works, identifying high-propensity voters down to the individual within a household, and explained that RCKRBX applies the identical methodology to lease-up.
“We apply that same microtargeting methodology that we use in the political world to our leasing accelerator tools… we’re able to tell people, here are the high propensity renters that you should be targeting down to the zip code, in some cases zip-plus-four level.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
Instead of the old spray-and-pray approach to leasing marketing, casting a wide net and hoping enough of the right people are in it, RCKRBX tells operators who to target, where they’re concentrated, and what messaging actually moves them from prospect to signed lease. And Michael’s framing of where this all came from is worth sitting with.
“In the 30s they used to say politicians were marketed like soap, and in today’s world I would say soap is marketed like a politician.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
What Happens When You Feed AI Bad Real Estate Data?
We inevitably got into AI, and Michael’s answer was refreshingly grounded compared to a lot of the hype I hear on this topic. He referenced an article that described the current moment as “the dot matrix printer stage” of the AI revolution, early, promising, and still full of failure modes nobody’s fully mapped yet.
“At the end of the day, AI is only as good as the information you feed it. So if your data is bad, or your data is so broad, trying to leverage AI to get some actionable business intelligence out of it, well, it’s only as good as what you feed it.”
— Michael Broder, CEO and Co-Founder, RCKRBX
That’s the whole ballgame, honestly, and it’s a theme I hear on nearly every episode of this show no matter the industry. More data isn’t the goal. The right data, verified and properly modeled, is what actually produces a usable prediction. RCKRBX independently validates respondent income, location, and identity beyond the survey itself specifically to keep aspirational answers, what Michael called “Cadillac taste and Chevrolet budgets,” from skewing the model.
The Bigger Picture
What I love about this conversation is that it’s a reminder that almost nothing in modern marketing data is actually new. Michael said it directly: nearly every technique used in consumer data today was perfected in political campaigns first, sometimes decades earlier. Microtargeting wasn’t invented for retail. It was running elections in the 1950s.
The real estate industry is just now catching up to what campaigns figured out about audience data a long time ago. And the operators who get there first, who stop building based on what worked last cycle and start building based on verified forward-looking demand, are the ones who are going to capture the pricing premium in an otherwise commoditized market.
Learn more about Michael Broder and RCKRBX at rckrbx.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.
At BDEX, we know that any predictive model, real estate or otherwise, is only as strong as the identity data underneath it. If you’re trying to reach real people instead of bots and bad data, visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
Watch the full episode: From Leads to Leases: Demand-Side Real Estate Data
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
