NEW YORK CITY-After eight years as director of research for a major commercial mortgage company, CRE veteran Jonathan Ingber knew how frustrating it was to secure all the financial information needed to close a deal from place to place, city to city. “I’ve seen the challenges that have faced the end users in getting very easy-to-use and very manageable data,” Ingber says. That’s why he spearheaded the effort to launch Actovia Commercial Mortgage Intelligence, a cloud-based lead discovery system serving the New York City CRE community.

The web-based program acts as a database where access to owners, buildings, addresses and financial data are available through cloud computing technologies, which act as digital servers on the Internet. The system is subscription-based and uses Microsoft Silverlight to mine data specifically for commercial mortgage professionals and appraisers, thereby streamlining and changing the dynamics of a typical transaction, Ingber says.

“We are coming into an area that the industry has never seen,” he says, explaining that cloud computing is consolidating research services and IT departments all-in-one, all online. “We really have been ratcheting up the opportunity to bring in more money to a different level, based on the value proposition of the quality of the data. We take mounds of it and bring the relevant information in and merge, clean and scrub the data to a way they just get what they need.”