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A month ago I said we'd torn our own product down to rebuild it — and that I'd show the work along the way.
This is what we built.
The data was never what was missing in commercial real estate. The vantage point was. Diald is the vantage point — one system for the 95% who've been running on spreadsheets and the 5% who never loved what they had.
Live today. Serious underwriting. $20 dollars a month. Link below.
One week ago we opened the rebuilt Diald. Here's the decision that got us there — and what the first week did to it.
When we shipped the old version in January, we thought we knew our user: institutional investors. The acquisitions teams, the analysts — the people the legacy stack already serves. Which is to say: we, too, were building for the 5%.
Then the signups came in. Roughly two-thirds weren't institutional at all. Family offices. HNW owners. Business owner-occupiers. People with real portfolios and no analyst. And the share kept growing.
We had two options: keep building for the user we'd imagined, or rebuild for the user who showed up. We chose the second — paused go-to-market in the middle of our best growth quarter and tore down a product that was working.
Last week was the verdict. The roster of first accounts reads like the thesis: family offices. A bank's credit desk, stress-testing borrowers' deals. A spec-industrial developer. An owner-operator running his own multifamily. Acquisitions teams too — sitting next to people who've never had an analyst to hand a deal to.
The most expensive gap in software is the one between who you built for and who arrives. Week one says we closed it from the right side.
If you'd rather see it than take my word for it: August 26, Cheyne Bloch and I run it live — an address in, a memo out, nothing edited. 70+ people are already in the room.
Registration in the comments.
Family offices and independent operators now control more than half of all U.S. commercial real estate value. But for these cohorts, properly evaluating a deal feels like finding a needle in an enormous haystack — finding data scattered across zoning records, permit filings, and market reports, with no institutional research team to pull it together.
@wealth_mgmt just reported on how our new platform is designed to close that gap.
Instead of leaning on generic metrics, Diald assesses whether a neighborhood's narrative actually holds up against the data — drawing on safety data, infrastructure, regulatory shifts, and local sentiment. The platform also analyzes a specific property type in a specific location, since the same block can be a strong bet for multifamily and a weak one for office.
Our redesign also brings institutional-grade analysis to investors no matter their experience with the industry. Users can input their data, ask questions, and customize variables using plain language, which Diald turns into a full financial model through an intuitive interface.
Check out the full piece here: wealthmanagement.com/alterna…
Doors are open: diald.ai — $20 a month, first month free for the first 500 accounts, cancel anytime.
Two weeks ago I wrote about a dentist who owns three medical office buildings — $1.4M of NOI running on QuickBooks, Dropbox, and an Excel sheet his accountant maintains.
I expected dentists to respond.
Instead, a commercial roofing president wrote that his industry has the same split: the national firms build for portfolio-scale clients, everyone else pieces it together. A founder who builds for the 1–4 unit residential world said the pattern repeats there. An investments director summed up the general mood: "Excel is going to be the death of me."
And the reactions filled in the rest of the map — a self-storage managing director, a healthcare-portfolio owner, a real estate CFO, a debt director who stress-tests other people's assumptions for a living.
But the line I keep coming back to arrived earlier, from an owner who signed up months ago: "I run my $40M CRE portfolio in Excel, because the real software is built for someone who isn't me."
The dentist was never a story about dentists. The stack is the story. Most of the people who own commercial real estate in America run it on some version of the same three tools, none of which was built for the decision they're actually making.
So this time the ask isn't "join a list."
Bring the building.
We open Monday, August 10. Email me what you have — rent roll, T-12, OM — at [email protected] this week, and during launch week we'll put your building through Diald together on a live screen share. Twenty minutes. Not a demo asset. Yours. First ones in get Monday morning.
DMs work too, if that's easier.
Waitlist: diald.ai/coming-soon
First 500 accounts get the first month free. Cancel anytime.
The obvious question about a market this size: if 19 in 20 CRE owners have no real software, why has nobody built it?
The honest answer: for twenty years, the economics didn’t work.
Serving this market meant enterprise software — seat licenses, sales teams, implementation, training. That model needs customers who buy seats by the dozen and staff analysts to run them. The dentist from last week’s post doesn’t. Most of the 95% doesn’t. The revenue per customer could never carry the cost of reaching them.
So the industry concluded these owners “don’t need software.” What that actually meant: nobody could afford to sell it to them.
What changed isn’t the market. It’s the cost of the product. When analysis is generated by software instead of assembled by hand — when underwriting a property costs a query instead of a consultant — the economics invert. The owner who could never justify a five-figure seat license can justify a subscription.
For the first time, the bigger half of the market is serviceable.
August 10: Waitlist in the comments.
August 10.
If you want in on day one: diald.ai/coming-soon — one-click sign-in the moment we open, and the first 500 accounts get their first month free.
Every startup claims to be the Carta of something. Bear with me — the parallel here is structural.
Before Carta, private-company equity was tracked in Excel and PDFs, by founders and law firms. The infrastructure that existed — NASDAQ, DTCC — was built for public markets. Most American companies ran on a system nobody designed for the people running them.
Not because the asset didn't matter. Because the owners were too many, too small, and too scattered for enterprise software economics to reach.
Sound familiar? 2.5–3 million entities own US commercial real estate. $15 trillion in value. The infrastructure that exists was built for institutions. Everyone else runs on the same Excel-and-PDFs system private-company equity ran on in 2011.
Carta built the missing layer and became the default for an asset class.
The CRE version of that layer is what we've been building.
August 10.
August 10. If you want in on day one: diald.ai/coming-soon — one-click sign-in the moment we open.
CoStar isn’t the giant of CRE software.
It’s the giant of CRE software for the institutional 5%.
For the other 19 in 20 owners, there is no incumbent. Property-management software reaches them — rent collection, maintenance, accounting. The decision stack doesn’t. No CoStar equivalent. No Argus equivalent. Nothing between a $15 trillion question and a blank spreadsheet.
The objection we hear most: “CoStar already owns this category.” The category it owns covers one owner in twenty.
That’s not a niche. That’s the frontier.
August 10. If you want in on day one: diald.ai/coming-soon — one-click sign-in the moment we open.
August 10.
diald.ai/coming-soon
First 500 accounts get the first month free. Cancel anytime.
Met someone a few weeks ago who owns three medical office buildings.
He's not a real estate professional. He's a dentist. He bought the first building 15 years ago because his landlord raised the rent and he ran the math. The other two followed.
Combined NOI: $1.4 million a year.
He spends six hours a month on reconciliations he hates. Another four chasing his property manager for answers. His "system" is three QuickBooks files, a Dropbox folder, and an Excel sheet his accountant maintains.
His property manager has software, of course. It works for the property manager.
When I asked what software he uses for the buildings, he looked at me like I'd asked what software he uses for his car.
He'd happily pay for a tool that worked. Nobody sells to him.
He's not the long tail. He's one of millions just like him. The customer proptech never built for.
Three weeks.
A few weeks back, we spent the better part of the afternoon at Google's LA office — the old Spruce Goose Hangar in Playa Vista, where Howard Hughes built the largest flying boat ever made.
The detail that stayed with me: a sculpture in the atrium, 2,800 steel balls hanging in the air. From almost every angle it's noise. From one specific vantage point, they resolve into the shape of the plane.
That's close to the problem we've spent two years on at @Diald_ai. In commercial real estate, the data is rarely what's missing — it's already out there, scattered. What's missing is the vantage point that turns it into a decision.
Good reason to be there: Diald was accepted into the @Google for Startups AI program, and we're building our August relaunch on Google Cloud's AI infrastructure. A few hours with Melanie Guillen and Moe Sy — thanks for the welcome.
More on that soon.
The legacy CRE software stack — CoStar, Argus, MSCI — serves roughly 5% of the people who own commercial real estate in America.
The other 95% relies on Excel.
Millions of entities. $15 trillion in property value. Family offices, business owner-occupiers, HNW families, foreign owners.
Not a long tail — by value, the bigger half of the market. And zero purpose-built underwriting or intelligence software.
The last few months taught me this gap is wider than the data shows. The 5% who do have software don't love what they have either.
Enterprise software for the top 5%. Excel for everyone else. Both are 30 years old in spirit.
More on what we've been building — soon.
A customer asked me last week what we've spent the last few months doing.
The honest answer: tearing down our own product and rebuilding it.
Not because it wasn't working — it was. Because what our users actually needed wasn't what we'd built. The gap was wider than I wanted to admit.
A month until we ship what comes next.
I'm going to write about the thesis, the work, and the decisions in between — here.
If you own commercial real estate, work with people who do, or build for either: follow along.
