JPI has made ApartmentIQ’s daily, unit-level data a core input to its market research. Over the past four years, JPI has integrated that data directly into its analytics, research, and underwriting workflows.
ApartmentIQ replaced JPI’s manual comp surveys with real-time multifamily market data: daily, unit-level insights collected from property websites every night, cleaned with advanced AI, and delivered straight into JPI’s own systems.
At a Glance
- Customer: JPI, a national Class A multifamily developer and merchant builder. Founded in 1989, headquartered in Dallas, TX, with offices nationwide.
- Products: Market Surveys, Explore Pro, forecasting, and API.
- Before: Comp data compiled manually from multiple sources, on monthly or quarterly cycles, delivered as fragmented exports.
- After: Daily, unit-level market data and granular forecasts feeding asset management, development underwriting, and BI, with legacy vendors steadily consolidated out.
Challenge: Big decisions. Lagging data.
JPI underwrites and builds Class A multifamily, and its data team runs on a single mandate. As David Drury, VP of Data and Analytics, frames it, his role is turning the data the company subscribes to into business intelligence that fuels data-driven decisions across the organization.
For decades, that data came from the traditional research vendors and relied on manual processes. JPI’s research inputs arrived on monthly or quarterly cycles at the market or submarket level, and filling the gaps meant compiling comps by hand, work that consumed analyst time and was difficult to scale across a national footprint.
Adding a new source was a deliberate process. JPI’s research workflows are long-established and institutionally trusted, so any new data had to be validated before it was adopted. “We had to jump through a lot of hoops to get buy-off and trust in the ApartmentIQ data to make the switch,” Drury says.
Solution: The full picture. Any market. Any property.
ApartmentIQ gave JPI what the legacy tools could not: real-time, unit-level visibility, delivered as data JPI could own.
Market Surveys delivers the daily comp intel with unit-level granularity, while Explore provides up to date rent, demographic, supply, and more with critical 5 year forecasts.
The foundation is nightly collection and AI cleansing. ApartmentIQ scans property websites every night, so JPI sees what competitors are actually advertising across its markets and submarkets, updated daily. The depth and the timeliness were the draw. Getting essentially real-time information across every market and submarket.
“It’s huge,” Drury says. “Getting real-time information on our comp set with ApartmentIQ Market Surveys has let us be a lot more proactive. And with Explore Pro, we can pull live data on our markets and submarkets into our research and underwriting workflows.”
JPI was one of the first ApartmentIQ customers to embrace API access for the data sets they needed. That early move turned a manual export process into an automated one, with scheduled data pulls landing directly in JPI’s systems and feeding an array of Power BI dashboards across asset management and development. “All of a sudden, we could pull all of the data that we need directly without any intervention,” Drury says.
“We started working with you on the API process, and that just changed the way we do business. All of a sudden we could pull all the data we need directly, without any intervention, and we could schedule those pulls and bring that data right into our system. So we weren’t having to export Excel spreadsheets or get data through other manual methods. We could bring it right in and integrate it into our other tools.”
— David Drury, VP of Data and Analytics at JPI
What made it stick was the partnership behind data connection, not just the connection itself. The ApartmentIQ team worked to understand what JPI was trying to achieve and helped curate the APIs so the right data, and only the right data, flowed into JPI’s environment.
“What made it so productive for us was the way the ApartmentIQ team worked with us to understand what we were trying to achieve and what data we really needed. They helped curate the APIs so we could actually get everything we needed and bring it seamlessly into our environment, which was huge.”
— David Drury, VP of Data and Analytics at JPI
With the industry-leading data and intelligence in hand, JPI’s analysts built their own layer on top: custom apps, adjusted similarity-scoring weights like distance versus year built, and their own submarkets. “What we really want to do is create our own submarkets based on the comps that we think are actually relevant,” Drury says.
The highest-stakes test was underwriting. JPI is at heart a merchant builder, so its hardest use case is pricing sites before anything is built, and ApartmentIQ evolved to meet it. The team could type in an address and generate a research report on a prospective site, “a piece of dirt, not an existing apartment community,” and underwrite a deal that did not exist yet.
The move itself was backed by analysis, not instinct. JPI compared what the traditional sources were saying against ApartmentIQ across its markets and, in Drury’s words, “found that we were getting a lot better data from ApartmentIQ.”
“We could actually type in an address and create a new research report focused on essentially a piece of dirt, not an existing apartment community, and still select comps and pull all the intelligence and information we needed from the system, even though we weren’t looking at an existing property to base our research off of.”
— David Drury, VP of Data and Analytics at JPI
Results: Manual comping out. Real-time data in.
JPI no longer compiles comp data by hand. Its teams rely on ApartmentIQ’s comp matching for owned and research properties and on automated collection in place of manual gathering. Today ApartmentIQ supports several JPI functions:
- Asset management: standardized reports that update continuously, plus a single view that combines ApartmentIQ with JPI’s PM systems.
- Development underwriting: ApartmentIQ data and forecasts feeding the models JPI uses to price prospective sites.
- Analytics and BI: API feeds into Power BI dashboards and custom-built apps spanning asset management and development.
With the data foundation in place, JPI is now building its AI roadmap with ApartmentIQ at the center, moving from analytical AI to agentic AI. The goal, Drury says, is “to take as much work off of our analysts’ plates, and really maximize the use of their brains, not necessarily their fingers.” To make that repeatable across the company, JPI is standardizing how its teams query the data, building a set of skills around the ApartmentIQ MCP so multiple users get consistent, repeatable results.
Four years in, the relationship is the foundation for what comes next. “We absolutely appreciate the partnership with ApartmentIQ,” Drury says. “It’s been key in us doing the evolution that we have done.”