Reonomy earned its reputation on a genuinely hard problem: figuring out who is behind a commercial building when the deed says nothing but 123 Main Street Holdings LLC. It stitches property records to companies to people, which is exactly what a broker chasing an off-market industrial deal needs.
The trouble is that a lot of teams arrive at Reonomy from a completely different job. They sell solar, roofing, or HVAC to homeowners, they hear that Reonomy is the serious property-data platform, and they end up paying for a commercial database to answer a residential question. This guide is about what to use instead — sorted by which part of Reonomy you were actually trying to buy.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product; treat that entry as a maker’s pitch and the rest as our honest read.
What Reonomy is actually built for
Reonomy indexes commercial real estate across the US — office, retail, industrial, multifamily, land — and layers ownership, debt, and transaction history on top. Its signature feature is entity resolution: piercing the LLC to find the human principals and their contact details. Altus Group acquired the company in November 2021 for roughly $201.5 million, and it now sits inside a portfolio built around institutional CRE valuation and analytics.
That shape has three consequences for a home-services team:
- The universe is wrong. Single-family owner-occupied homes are the properties you sell to and the properties Reonomy is least interested in. Coverage on them is incidental, not the product.
- The signals are wrong. Reonomy answers “who owns this asset and what is the capital stack.” A roofing company needs “which roofs took hail last Tuesday.” Neither database is bad; they are built around different questions.
- The pricing shape is wrong. CRE platforms are priced per seat for researchers doing deep work on a few dozen assets. An outbound floor burning fifty thousand records a month is not that buyer, and the per-seat math gets ugly fast.
The alternatives, by job
| Job you were hiring Reonomy for | Where to look instead |
|---|---|
| Commercial property research and CRE comps | Stay on Reonomy, or look at CoStar and Crexi. This is the one job where the residential tools genuinely cannot help you |
| Unmasking an LLC to reach a human | Credentialed investigative tools — idiCORE, TLOxp, Accurint — which do entity and person work across both property classes |
| Residential property research and filters | PropertyRadar, PropStream, or BatchLeads — built around residential records and investor-style filters |
| Homeowner lists with phones, at outbound volume | Scout Data’s Atlas — residential audiences built from live property signals, shipped with owner-matched, DNC-scrubbed contact data |
The mistake underneath the search
Almost every home-services team that ends up on a Reonomy trial made the same reasoning error: they treated property data as one commodity and went looking for the best version of it. Property data is not one commodity. It splits along two axes that barely overlap.
The first axis is asset class. Commercial and residential records come from different sources, are maintained at different cadences, and resolve ownership in fundamentally different ways. A commercial platform that is excellent at LLC-piercing can be thin on the owner-occupant next door.
The second axis is research versus outbound. Research tools optimise for depth on one property: every lien, every transfer, every principal. Outbound tools optimise for a hundred thousand properties at once, where what matters is whether the phone number reaches the person who can say yes. Reonomy sits firmly in commercial research. If you sell to homeowners at volume, you are two axes away.
Where Scout Data fits
Atlas is residential and outbound-shaped on purpose. It builds homeowner audiences from live property signals — hail and wind mapped within hours of a storm, more than a million new permits a week, roof age, system age, ownership changes — and ships them with phone numbers matched by name to the owner of record, scrubbed against the federal do-not-call registry before delivery, with dead numbers replaced. The same graph is queryable per property through the API when you would rather pull records into your own stack than work from exports.
What it is not: a commercial real estate platform. If your deal flow is industrial or multifamily, Reonomy is the better tool and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing.
How to decide in one afternoon
Pull fifty properties you genuinely want to sell to this month. Not a sample list — the real ones. Run them through whichever tool you are evaluating and score two things: did it have the property at all, and did it give you a phone number that reaches the decision-maker. Raw record counts and marketing claims collapse quickly under that test; the method is written up in our skip tracing accuracy guide.
If your fifty properties are commercial, you will have your answer and it will be Reonomy. If they are single-family homes with people living in them, you will find out fast that you were shopping in the wrong aisle — and the residential options in the table above are where to look next.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Reonomy?
Altus Group, the commercial real estate analytics company, acquired Reonomy in November 2021 for roughly $201.5 million. Reonomy now operates as an Altus Group business, which is why its roadmap has moved further toward institutional CRE valuation and away from prospecting.
Can Reonomy be used for residential leads?
Not really, and that is by design. Reonomy indexes commercial property — multifamily, industrial, office, retail — along with the LLCs and principals behind it. A solar or roofing team selling to owner-occupants of single-family homes is asking a commercial database for a residential answer. You will get coverage gaps on exactly the properties you sell to.
What is the closest residential equivalent to Reonomy?
There is no single one, because Reonomy bundles three jobs: property research, entity unmasking, and contact discovery. For residential, PropertyRadar and PropStream cover research, investigative tools like idiCORE cover entity work, and Scout Data’s Atlas covers signal-built homeowner lists with contact data attached.