The team behind cannabis real estate startup HerbFront is at it again. Its new venture, CartoFront, shows that the business is more about the real estate than the cannabis.
“At HerbFront, we made maps that essentially pinpointed where you could put any kind of cannabis facility,” said co-founder Nathan Glaisner. “Using that information for HerbFront, we realized we can expand that approach to all other real estate groups.”
To that end, the company has adapted its map-based platform for additional use cases and expanded the amount of data it gathers about properties.
“We have about 150 data points for every single parcel of land in the Chicagoland area,” said Glaisner.
That includes ownership and contact information: the company has telephone numbers for nearly 75 percent of properties in the area. It also includes information about life events like death, divorce, foreclosure and bankruptcy filings, which is automatically populated from court records and can give users a heads-up about properties about to hit the market.
Beyond information about owners, CartoFront also lets users sort properties based on attributes like zoning and nearby amenities. Developments on some properties near public transit stops in Chicago, for instance, can legally provide fewer off-street parking spots to residents. Since these lots allow for better space utilization, they are also more profitable for developers. CartoFront can visualize where such properties exist throughout the city.
Part of the 1871-based Elmspring Accelerator, Glaisner said HerbFront met with a lot of bigger real estate companies who were intrigued by the company’s technological capabilities but less interested in the cannabis angle. As a result, the company started work on a more general-purpose platform a little over a year ago.
Though CartoFront draws heavily on HerbFront for its basic functionality, the developer team created an interface that lets users create custom filters and maps drawing on as many data points as they want. The expanded filters are based on data from 16 separate providers.
After bringing CartoFront live about four months ago, Glaisner said the company is already seeing great traction.
“We are in roughly 30 real estate offices across the Chicagoland area,” he said. “We’ve been happy with our growth, and we actually plan to be in 10 different markets by the end of the year.”
Those markets include Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas, among others. To support that expansion, Glaisner said he expects to add several geographic information system specialists to his 12-person team.
CartoFront is available to real estate professionals on a yearly subscription model. Glaisner said the company is developing enterprise partnerships with larger groups of brokers, realtors and developers as well.
Image via CartoFront.
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