The Long Game: How Altrio is Building Real Estate's First True Digital Deal Platform

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

21 Aug 2025

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The real estate capital markets remain largely offline, operating through a fragmented ecosystem of email chains, PDF downloads, and manual data entry that would seem outdated in almost any other industry. While numerous companies have attempted to digitize various pieces of the transaction process, none have successfully created a comprehensive platform where deals can actually be executed online.

Raj Singh, CEO of Altrio, believes the key to solving this challenge lies not in building a traditional marketplace, but in taking a patient, methodical approach that recognizes the unique dynamics of institutional real estate. After nearly two decades in real estate technology, Singh has witnessed countless attempts to bring the industry online fail due to cold start problems and the relationship-driven nature of large commercial transactions.

“I’ve seen a lot of pitch decks for real estate marketplaces, and none of them have ever worked,” Singh explains. “They usually die for reasons related to the cold start problem. The other issue is there’s often adverse selection around some of this stuff. In the institutional space, folks get the sense that if a deal turns up on a marketplace, it’s probably because it wasn’t good enough to make its way through the normal channels.”

A Career Built on Real Estate Technology

Raj Singh’s path to founding Altrio began as a high school intern at Brookfield, where he was hired for basic IT tasks but quickly began building small applications for employees. “I knew how to code and went rogue that first summer, writing little applications for folks,” he recalls. “I’d be chatting at someone’s desk while replacing a broken mouse, and they’d tell me about their challenges. I was very curious and asked a lot of questions.”

This early exposure to real estate operations became a recurring theme throughout Singh’s career. After completing his MBA while continuing to work in real estate technology, he moved into consulting, advising companies on technology roadmaps and building custom data warehouse solutions. The consulting revealed a consistent pattern: real estate companies were struggling to organize and access information needed for investment decisions. “A lot of the consulting work I was doing was around data warehousing, and it was this attempt that real estate companies were making to organize information about their own portfolios and the market, because none of this information was available anywhere to go and get easily,” Singh notes.

This led to his first software company, Voyanta, “one of the very first cloud-based software solutions for the real estate industry.” The timing proved challenging, as most real estate companies had never purchased cloud-based software and were running their own data centers. “We were almost too early in terms of being leading edge into the cloud,” Singh reflects.

After selling Voyanta to Altus Group, Singh spent time at Argus, where his product management and marketing roles gave him access to industry leaders. “Everyone loves and hates Argus, but one thing that is for sure is everyone uses Argus. I could call up the technology heads at basically any real estate company and get them on the phone.”

The Offline Problem

Through these roles, Singh consistently encountered the same challenge: the complete disconnectedness of real estate capital markets. “The biggest, most frustrating thing about every step in the process is just the fact that none of the information you need is organized and available anywhere,” he explains.

The root cause, Singh realized, was that the marketplace operates entirely offline. “Brokers are blasting emails around the world, and then investors and lenders are opening those emails and replying again via email. Confidentiality agreements are flying around over email. All people ever do with data rooms is log in, download everything, and then close the data room and go off and do their work offline again.”

This fragmented approach means valuable information generated during transactions is never aggregated or made available in an organized, accessible format. “At the end of the day, none of the information that’s generated or used in the capital markets is ever aggregated or made available online in any way that’s organized and easy to use.”

Building the Platform Gradually

Rather than attempting to create a marketplace from scratch, Singh designed Altrio to solve the cold start problem gradually. The company began with information management and automation tools for real estate investors and lenders, helping them organize their internal processes and data.

“We knew it would be impossible to create any sort of collaborative platform all at once because of the cold start problem,” Singh explains. “You can’t build a platform that requires people to be there to work because you have the chicken and egg problem.”

After establishing a user base among investors and lenders, Altrio replicated the platform for brokers, creating value independently for both sides. This foundation enabled the company’s launch of digital deal execution, allowing brokers and investors to collaborate within the same platform.

“Because we now have users on both sides, investors and lenders, including a lot of big institutions, and now brokers on the other side, we can start to build the connective tissue between both platforms,” Singh says.

Digital Deal Execution in Practice

The digital deal execution platform represents a shift from traditional transaction processes. Instead of brokers sending teasers via email and directing parties to data rooms, deals are marketed within Altrio as structured information that can be accessed and analyzed immediately.

“When a broker markets a deal in Altrio, the investor on the other side is able to access not just a data room, but actually a set of structured information about that deal,” Singh explains. “If you’re an Altrio customer, as soon as you’ve signed the confidentiality agreement online, you’re going to have that deal in your pipeline with all the information about the properties, leases, and comparables. You can immediately start underwriting that deal.”

This approach eliminates the typical workflow of downloading PDFs and manually extracting information. “It’s almost like a Google Doc, you’re sharing the same deal between the broker and the investor,” Singh notes.

The platform’s next evolution will extend to collaborative due diligence and closing. “Both the broker and the investor can start to share tasks, share diligence lists, share closing lists, invite their lawyers into the platform, and really put structure around the entire execution of the deal.”

Network Effects Over Marketplace Dynamics

Singh’s vision for Altrio differs from traditional marketplace models. “I don’t fundamentally see it as a marketplace. I actually see it more as a social network,” he explains. “In the institutional sphere, when you’re dealing with $20, $30, $50, $100 million assets, it’s not a marketplace, it’s a social network. There’s a set of players who know each other, trust each other, and do deals together.”

This distinction is crucial for understanding how large commercial real estate transactions occur. “They’re not going to use a marketplace. They’re going to use an online platform that allows them to do what they’re doing far more efficiently, but it’s still going to be their network. It’s still going to be brokers sending deals to people they want to send deals to.”

The platform’s intelligence comes from having both sides using the system to manage their deals. “We actually have a lot of real time intelligence around the types of deals that investors and lenders are looking for and the types of deals that brokers and sponsors are bringing to market,” Singh says. “We can do a much better job of matchmaking than a marketplace can because we actually know if you underwrote the deal and passed on it.”

The Information Challenge

One of Singh’s key insights is that all the information needed to evaluate real estate deals already exists, it’s just trapped in inaccessible formats. He illustrates this with a common scenario: “I’m a big institutional investor looking to sell a retail asset. I’m going to take information about my tenants out of a structured database like RealPage or Yardi and export it into a PDF or spreadsheet. I’m going to send it to a broker who will manually pull that information into another spreadsheet, give it to a designer to put in a glossy offering memorandum, and email that to a potential investor who will pull information out of that PDF into a spreadsheet for analysis.”

This process of converting structured data into unstructured formats and back again creates inefficiencies throughout the transaction lifecycle. “The information that any of these parties is actually using isn’t coming from any sort of structured database. It’s usually coming from an emailed document,” Singh notes.

Looking Forward

Singh acknowledges that Altrio’s approach requires patience in an industry known for quick pivots and rapid scaling. “I think the reason people haven’t really done this is not a lot of people start a company to achieve something over a 10-year horizon. But one of the things I learned working in real estate for over two decades is this industry does not move quickly.”

The company’s launch of digital deal execution is a milestone, but Singh views it as just the beginning. “We launched digital deal execution a few weeks ago after having a beta out for a few months. We signed up several brokerage teams to use Altrio to manage their process, similar to how investors have been doing it.”

As more transactions flow through the platform, Singh expects to see true network effects. “That collaboration is going to take some time to have enough back and forth so that you get that marketplace emerging. It was always something we recognized would need to be done gradually.”

For an industry that has long resisted digital transformation, Altrio’s methodical approach to bringing real estate capital markets online may prove to be exactly what’s needed. By focusing on creating value for each participant while building toward collaborative deal execution, Singh is positioning the company to finally solve the offline problem that has plagued commercial real estate for decades.

The success of this approach will ultimately depend on whether the industry is ready to embrace a more structured, efficient way of conducting business, one deal at a time.