On the heels of a Justice Department settlement and the appointment of a new CEO, RealPage — whose use of nonpublic property data in rent-setting software drew years of antitrust scrutiny — is leaning further into artificial intelligence and real estate data with its acquisition of proptech platform Cherre.
According to RealPage CEO Dirk Wakeham, Cherre helps institutional owners and investors combine information from property-management systems, tax records, market data and other sources — and the acquisition will help RealPage move beyond automating property-management tasks and toward AI tools that inform investment and operating decisions across real estate portfolios, he told Inman.
Wakeham said RealPage plans to keep Cherre as a separate operating unit, retain its brand and invest additional capital in accelerating its growth. The company did not underwrite the acquisition around cost savings or staff reductions, he said.
The acquisition also comes as RealPage continues to contend with scrutiny over how property owners use data and algorithms to set rents. The company reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in November 2025 over claims involving its revenue-management software.
Asked whether the Cherre deal created additional antitrust exposure as RealPage expands its data capabilities, Wakeham said he was not concerned. He argued that housing affordability is driven primarily by insufficient supply, while acknowledging that consumer rights and algorithmic pricing will remain under scrutiny.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: You’ve been back at RealPage for almost nine months, and this is your first major acquisition during this tenure as CEO. Why Cherre, and what does the deal say about what you want RealPage to become?
Wakeham: I looked at four proptech headlines the other day, and every one of them had the word AI in it. Everybody is scrambling to say, “We have an AI flavor, an AI product or an AI offering.”
Like everyone else, we’ve been at it for a while, and we’ve figured out a couple of things. One is that change management at the properties is not trivial. We can introduce the greatest products in the world, but if we can’t get people to use them, adopt them and gain value from them, we’re going to fail.
The second and probably more important issue is the source of truth. This industry is stuck with lots and lots of siloed solutions, and reconciling those into a single source of truth is a real problem.
You can’t build AI that allows an owner to make informed business decisions if two, three or four pieces of data don’t reconcile. Cherre is an AI story, but it’s really a foundational story. It’s about building a trusted, governed and secure data source that customers can put their AI on top of and trust to make business decisions.
Are you able to disclose the terms of the acquisition?
Wakeham: During my first tour of duty here, we were a public company, and we always had to disclose an acquisition if it was over a certain amount. One of the beauties of being a private company is that we don’t have to disclose it, so we’re choosing not to say the terms of the deal.
The announcement says Cherre connects property-level information with portfolio- and fund-level context. What does that mean in practice?
Wakeham: Cherre’s ideal customers today are the largest global capital allocators. Think of Brookfield, Nuveen or Starwood. These are companies placing bets across multiple real estate categories, and they need decision intelligence around where to place those bets and which assets are worth buying.
Cherre came at the market from the top down, with this notion of the portfolio. We’ve been coming at it from the bottom up with a deep operating platform at the property level. We view those two things as now coming together.
Cherre has the ability to aggregate macro data, whether that’s property tax information, employment data within a geography or job growth. It helps owners identify which assets to buy.
We intend to augment that with our detailed operating data. We can look at a property and say, “We think this one is under-optimized. Here are its operating characteristics, and with improved operations, you could add value.”
Will Cherre continue operating independently, or will it be folded into RealPage?
Wakeham: We intend to keep it as an independent operating unit. One thing we’ve figured out after doing this more than 60 times is that you can destroy a company with 50 people pretty quickly.
The plan is to keep Cherre as a separate business unit. They’re going to retain their name, but they will be a RealPage company and have access to the breadth and resources of our roughly 8,000 people — hopefully in a way that doesn’t break them in the process.
Are there overlapping teams or products that could lead to immediate cost reductions?
Wakeham: Quite the opposite. This is one where we didn’t underwrite synergies. We actually underwrote an additional investment.
We think they have a platform that we can accelerate. We’ve signed contracts with third parties to help with that, and we’ve opened up a number of requisitions. They were a small company growing methodically, and we want to accelerate that. We’ll be putting more capital into it, so it can grow faster.
RealPage described the deal as connecting the full real estate capital stack. What is the longer-term vision?
Wakeham: We have the broadest surface area in rental real estate, I think, in the world in terms of the subject areas we cover. That includes utility management, revenue management, operations, procurement and financial services.
We’re clearly looking at Cherre as a way to expand into other asset classes — probably not on the operating side, but certainly on the investment and capital allocation side.
Most of Cherre’s capital allocator customers are investing across multiple asset types, whether that’s hospitality, commercial, residential or rental. We view this as a natural expansion into those other asset categories.
Rental housing is an enormous business in the United States and globally, but the other asset classes are equally material or even larger. We view this as a way to expand our footprint into those areas.
Does the acquisition put RealPage in more direct competition with data companies such as CoStar?
Wakeham: CoStar operates in a slightly different world. Clearly, they’re a data company. We have a long-term partnership with CoStar where Apartments.com sits at the top of the stack bringing leads in, and our system sits one layer below that. We capture those leads and allow the consumer to schedule a tour, book an appointment, complete an application and go through the leasing process.
On the data side, CoStar is more of a hard-data company. Cherre is not really a data company. It is a platform that allows customers to aggregate data.
Even with Cherre, a customer can ingest CoStar data. The customer licenses that data from CoStar and then uses the Cherre platform to combine market-comparison data with information from its other systems and sources.
How is RealPage thinking about AI beyond automating individual jobs or tasks?
Wakeham: We’re thinking about AI in a number of lanes. We have a suite of products called the Lumina AI Workforce designed around existing functions within our customers’ businesses.
We have an agent that can handle leasing processes, schedule appointments and tours, conduct follow-up and get people started on applications. We have a resident agent that functions as a customer service or concierge tool. A resident can submit a service request or reserve a shared space.
Those products replace or augment functions that a person at a property might perform. Everybody is doing some version of that.
Where we see AI going with Cherre and others is moving up to decision intelligence. Rather than asking how to automate a task or make somebody’s job easier, the question becomes: How do you outperform your peers using tools that can ingest petabytes of data and produce decision insights?
A lot of real estate data is unorganized and unreconciled. Cherre can take an address that might appear three different ways in three different systems and resolve it as a single entity. You can then combine tax data, market-comparison data and job-growth information in that ZIP code much more efficiently.
RealPage’s announcement repeatedly describes the combined platform as ‘trusted.’ What does trust mean in this context?
Wakeham: First, can the customer trust the data enough to make a decision?
They may have four sources providing different answers to the same question. Take vacancy. One system may say there are five vacant units, and another may say there are four because they define vacancy differently. Is the unit physically vacant? Is the resident on notice? Has the resident moved out while the lease remains active?
Cherre can reconcile those definitions so the customer can make a business decision based on trusted information.
There’s also the question of who customers are trusting with their data. Are we keeping it secure? Do we have a governance layer and protocols to ensure that it remains private?
That applies to the property owner and property manager, but also to the resident. Can the resident trust that their personal information will remain personal? We have bank accounts, credit reports and lots of sensitive information involving our customers’ customers.
What has changed within RealPage since the DOJ litigation and settlement?
Wakeham: We’re much more focused on ensuring that customers understand where their data is, what is being done with it and how they can be assured it is governed.
Cherre has a very strict tenant-isolation methodology where each customer’s data is hard-isolated within that customer’s own physical tenant. One customer’s data is not crossing over into another customer’s data.
Particularly when we are the system of record, there are dozens of integration partners that want access to customer data to perform some function. There is much more emphasis now on knowing what data they received, how much they received and whether that access was logged.
If a provider accesses a rent roll containing personally identifiable information, how are we tracking that and providing assurance that it only accessed the data it was supposed to receive? Do we have evidence available if the customer needs to defend itself in court?
A lot of this is about logging, governance and preparing customers for the inevitability that someone will ask: How did this data get there, who has it, and why do they have it? That was one of the major rationales for Cherre. It already has infrastructure for hard tenant isolation.
Given RealPage’s recent antitrust litigation and the continued scrutiny surrounding algorithmic pricing, do you believe the company remains exposed to antitrust risk as it expands its data capabilities?
Wakeham: I’m not concerned about antitrust on this. There is certainly going to be ongoing pressure around affordability. We’re convinced it is a supply problem, not a demand problem. They’re looking at the symptom, not the cure.
That is going to be an ongoing project for us — working with and educating people in the market and regulators. The answer isn’t the evil property owner and alleged collusion. It’s that you don’t have enough apartments in your town that people can afford to live in, and that drives prices up.
With affordability and everything going on, we’re going to see this everywhere. It doesn’t just happen in housing. It’s happening with how Walmart prices, how Amazon prices and why two people can request an Uber at the same time and receive two different prices based on an algorithm.
Consumer rights are going to continue to be front and center. We need to be prepared to defend what we do, how we do it and why we think the problem is not necessarily pricing. The problem is supply.
What should the real estate industry understand about where AI is heading?
Wakeham: The opportunity for AI in real estate is not about better models, more capable models or frontier models.
It is about trusted, reliable data underneath those models, as well as managing the change and getting people to embrace the tools. People need to understand how to work alongside them to create better outcomes for property owners and their customers.
AI can only transform real estate if it understands real estate.
