I wanted to share something I have been working on for awhile now, which is a new investment data company serving the real estate and hard asset spaces. The company is called Valyte, and we are launching today!

Valyte is launching with coverage of the REIT space1, something near and dear to my heart, and we plan to expand soon into other hard asset sectors, most notably energy given the current crisis.

Valyte is a data platform that aggregates and publishes the key data points for publicly traded REITs, including arguably the most important metric of Net Asset Value, or NAV2. Valyte also gathers and calculates a slew of other metrics, such as implied yield on cost3, NOI & rent growth, occupancy, leverage, G&A costs, and many many more.

Here is a teaser of what the data looks like - this is Q4 data for the multifamily sector.

Valyte’s companies table. N/A means the data is not available - BRT doesn’t report specific figures for new leases and renewals consistently.

The idea is for Valyte to be the first place you go to understand or underwrite a REIT, and to help surface potentially interesting REIT investment opportunities ( and other hard asset sectors soon). We aim to have all the relevant public info available on our system - we aren’t quite there yet, but I believe its already better than almost anything else available, and its only going to improve from here.

If you are interested in the platform and want to learn more, please feel free to drop me a line. Otherwise if you’d like to sign up for this, you can use this sign up link below. We are offering a 5 day free trial right now, and afterwards the pricing is $150/month for all sectors on an annual subscription, or $42/month for a single sector on an annual commitment. Monthly subscriptions are available as well.

We are offering a 25% launch discount for early users, you can use this code FRIENDSOFWARDENCAPITAL to get the discount.

How It Works

The way it works is we have built an AI powered engine to gather the relevant data from company financials and SEC documents. Critically, we were able to use my investment expertise combined with a cutting edge AI system to create a framework which is able to actually manage the hundreds of different edge cases and adjustments that are needed across the different data points and companies in our coverage universe. Things like treatment & allocation of management fees & G&A burden, cash vs non cash accounting, non consolidated JVs, the list goes on and on. All of those little manual checks and adjustments you would have to do by hand, Valyte now does automatically.

Most importantly of all, we combine this AI engine with actual humans in the loop to underwrite NAV and verify & review data. Every data series we have is manually reviewed and initialized by a person, and is monitored by error tracking algorithms and humans on an ongoing basis. The reason we do this is that while AI is amazing and capable of many things, as we all know it makes mistakes and can still be brittle. This review not only ensures our data is as accurate as possible, but it means our system is ever improving, as we are able to fix errors before they are visible to the user and then improve the system so they aren’t made again.

And we all know how important accurate data is in the investment business - many interesting investments happen around those edge cases or the margins, where you are looking for an outlier in some way. Valyte is designed to help you find those outliers.

Company Details

You can dive into a specific company’s details to get more granular data than what is shown on the companies table, including our detailed NAV calculation and any relevant analyst notes we publish.

Things like geographic portfolio data, or historical operating history can also be viewed on the company details page.

Or here is office REIT Vornado’s leasing volume - you can see a steady increase reflecting the strengthening office fundamentals in the NYC market, which has helped drive VNO’s occupancy up.

We are rolling out total leasing right now across the relevant asset classes. This is a great example of how quickly we can spin up new data coverage - I only created this item Friday and we should have full coverage on it this week. So if there is something you want us to track and we don’t please feel free to ask about it!

We have a pretty big roadmap to continue to beef up these company detail pages, so I’m excited to share more here as we release more features over the coming months.

A Note on NAVs

NAVs are a huge part of the value offering of our platform, so its worth spending a bit of time discussing how these are calculated. The Valyte platform gathers and aggregates the data, but at the end of the day a human analyst (currently me), does the actual underwriting to generate a NAV. The most important variable in a NAV is the cap rate - I select these based on individual company underwriting and review of market data to understand where the types of assets a given REIT owns are trading. The other critical adjustments I make are to non cash flowing assets, such as developments or land, and where necessary I will haircut these (sometimes significantly) if the value a company has given or spent diverges significantly from market values.

What NAV does not incorporate is any company level adjustments - it is meant to be an estimate of the private market value of the company’s assets. While it is fairly hard for a REIT management team to be so amazing that the firm is worthy of a big NAV premium, it is unfortunately much easier for a team to be so bad, or misaligned with shareholders, as to create a large NAV discount. The classic example of this is with many externally managed REITs - the external manager is often incentivized to grow the business at all costs, and to maximize their profits, but not necessarily the REITs. Sometimes this leads to disastrous results, or situations where the fees owed to the external manager are so high that share holders are only left with scraps. While this structure has thankfully become less common over time as investors push back against it, it still exists and many of the largest NAV discounts are driven by misaligned or poor management teams.

Our NAV calculations are not perfect, but I aim to make them as high quality as possible and I am able to leverage my extensive investing experience to do so.

The Value of Accurate Data

You can also use the platform to screen for REITs that stand out on a given metric (such as say NAV discount). All of our work on accuracy and edge cases means that our screens are actually useful, unlike those of most of the major data providers.

If you have ever used one of the major financial data providers to run a screen, you will understand the value of accuracy and the kind of edge case adjustments we make. All too often when you run some kind of screen, the top results are almost all just wrong or not applicable. As a user this is frustrating and a big waste of time - you have to re-run all the numbers yourself, and at that point, what even is the value provided? Valyte is able to use our AI platform and massive context library to fix this.

Sector Summaries

I also wanted Valyte to be a platform where you can easily understand overall operating trends & data for things like rent, occupancy or NOI growth. For example here is a summary of Q4 apartment operating data, where you can easily see a quick summary of how the sector overall performed, and individual stand outs.

A multifamily Q4 2025 report. As you can see here, the sector is trading over a 6.55% implied yield on cost, and has slightly negative NOI growth along with declining occupancy. These declining fundamentals may explain the large NAV discount the sector is trading at.

Right now you have to run these reports yourself, but one of the next features we are working on is a way to push these out automatically as REIT’s report earnings, and hopefully this is something we can have ready for the Q1 2026 data coming out now.

Why did we build this?

The reason I wanted to build Valyte is that LLMs have opened up new possibilities in the software and data space. In particular for our business, there just isn’t a great source for investment data on hard asset businesses. The big data providers do a very poor job of coverage, and are missing a lot of critical sector specific data. You can get similar coverage from equity research firms who do all of the work manually, but unfortunately this means the cost is very high, and the coverage is limited! And that means limited to no small cap coverage, which is often where some of the more interesting opportunities are.

What really got me going was the case of Plymouth Real Estate, which was my largest investment in 2025 (although I wish I had bought more in hindsight). Plymouth was a small cap industrial REIT whose stock got crushed last year and fell to a huge discount to NAV / a very high implied yield on cost despite a reasonably nice portfolio and the rest of the industrial space doing fairly well. I try to monitor for these kinds of situations, and so I noticed it and bought a bunch - which worked out nicely when it rallied ~50% on a take out offer. But because it was a small cap, no one was covering this and I had to do all the work myself. Which is hard to do for every REIT out there - I just happened to be looking in the right place at the right time.

I realized that what I needed was a system to track the entire REIT universe so I wouldn’t miss any future Plymouths, and that LLMs had gotten to a point where they could be used to build such a system. And so Valyte was born. Rather than create an internal tool for REITs, I realized there was an opportunity here to create a platform not just for real estate, but all hard assets. So I partnered with my two technical cofounders, Nic Novak, a cofounder and head of engineering of Sequoia backed Magic, and Alex Quinlan, the second engineer at Blue Apron, to create a true platform.

Coming Soon

While we offer full coverage on most of the REIT sectors, we still have more work to do in order to expand coverage to the entire REIT universe. Next up we will be working to add storage and then likely hospitality REITs in the core REIT product. We also intend to deepen the core REIT offering as well by continuing to roll out new data tracking & analysis.

But as I mentioned in the beginning, we are also working overtime to roll out a beta version our basic energy offering. Energy is another sector that is perhaps even more buried in industry specific figures than even real estate, and I look forward to codifying the relevant context in this sector in order to offer up high quality data and combining the static financials & assumptions with live strip pricing data. This is especially relevant given crude oil’s significant rally this year.

So this is our plan, but of course plans can change and if there are any sectors or firms you are really interested in us covering, I’d love to hear it. I’d also be interested in hearing if there are any specific data fields we don’t have you are interested in seeing.

So again, if you are interested in the platform and want to learn more, please feel free to drop me a line. Otherwise would love for you to sign up and check us out using the free trial period.

And don’t forget we are offering a 25% launch discount for early users, so use this discount code FRIENDSOFWARDENCAPITAL when signing up.

We are also exploring potential API integrations or white label usage, so if you work for a larger institution and want to talk, please do reach out.

Finally, a note on my writing here. I will be re-focusing on writing about REITs as part of the Valyte launch, and will try to feature interesting situations I find from the Valyte data. I probably will stop doing my general investment writing in order to make more time for REIT oriented writing, although I may still do some general posts along those lines. Otherwise, I am still running my real estate and public equity investments and there are no changes there. But Valyte is obviously going to be a big area of focus for me moving forward and is something I am quite excited about.

We will also be launching Valyte’s own social platforms this week, where we will feature shorter, more frequent data drops or teasers. Whereas I will try to keep this page more focused on longer deep dive write ups.

So if you aren’t already subscribed to my Substack and are interested in hearing more, please sign up below. I will be doing more REIT commentary, and probably will still do a few non REIT write ups as well, as there is a lot of interesting stuff going on outside the REIT world as well.

Specifically we are launching with coverage of multifamily, single family rentals, industrial, office and retail REITs. We aim to add self storage and hospitality soon and then continue from there. We are not currently covering REITs that are being taken private or liquidating - the former because there isn’t much to cover there, and the latter because it would require a new back end system and there are only a few of them. If you are interested in getting coverage on REITs in liquidation please let me know, it is something we would consider if there was good demand for it.

NAV is an estimate of what the REIT’s assets would sell for in the private market if the company were to sell them all, not inclusive of liquidation costs or taxes, on a net per share basis (eg the equity value). REITs and other hard assets are somewhat unique amongst public companies in that their value is almost 100% driven by the physical assets they own, and there is a robust private market for those assets. So at any time the company can relatively easily decide to liquidate, or sell it self to a large private investor, if it believes its stock is trading at an overly large discount to NAV. Sure enough as many REITs were/are trading at large NAV discounts, and we saw a number of take privates liquidations in 2025 as boards attempted to narrow the share price/ nav discounts.

Implied yield on cost is an attempt to isolate what the implied cap rate is for a REIT’s portfolio given where its stock is trading today. The basic calculation is NOI / enterprise value, however enterprise value must be adjusted for non cash flowing assets, and this is where things can get complicated and some of the true value of Valyte’s platform comes into play. We have built out a host of sector and company level adjustments to account for all the myriad edge case variables & give a high quality answer.

Introducing Valyte