The California commercial real estate market is like many data intensive industries. The information is available—there just hasn’t been a good way to extract it in a useful format.

Addressing that issue is what brought about the birth of CaliforniaLinx. This hyperlocal database and website is working to provide all of the stakeholders in a commercial real estate deal with a way to make transactions easier.

Before CaliforniaLinx, users would have to go to multiple databases and websites for data, most of it raw and fragmented. Neighborhood by neighborhood, CaliforniaLinx is compiling the data stakeholders need most to advance real estate deals.

Tran Pham, a self-described numbers nerd, is one of the founders of CaliforniaLinx. The company, which launched in September, is still in its infancy, but preliminary responses from testers are overwhelmingly positive.

“We have a user who works for a big brokerage firm who uses the platform daily,” says Pham. “He has used other services, but he finds the information on them fragmented. He likes CaliforniaLinx because of the way the data is packaged and because the information is centralized.” Pham says that is essentially what sets CaliforniaLinx apart from other commercial real estate data services.

Under CaliforniaLinx, you can find data on the owner of a property, lender, investor and other properties in the market. It is a directory of everyone in the industry, but with the added bonus of allowing the user to see relationships as well.

Pham points out that many real estate properties are not listed under a person, but rather an entity. A person who owns multiple properties, may have a real estate entity for each property. Until CaliforniaLinx, there was no way to easily associate an individual with all of the properties owned by him or her.

“In many databases, you can see that John Smith controls an entity that owns property at 1 ABC street, but in CaliforniaLinx, you can also see that John Smith is the director of 6 other entities that own 12 other properties,” explains Pham. CaliforniaLinx takes it a step further by classifying owners and investors according to the size of their portfolios. End users seeking large real estate investors in a given neighborhood can search the database using that criteria.

Building CaliforniaLinx is a labor of love. Because it focuses on the local real estate market, they are building it out one neighborhood at a time. The plan is to cover all of California and maybe even neighboring states, says Pham with a laugh.

Pham and her team are proud of the work they are doing and the ability CaliforniaLinx has to make real estate transactions more transparent.

“We have relationships with these people in the industry and we because we are local and providing that nitty gritty detail in the local market of a neighborhood and what it looks like, we are seeing a lot of positive response.”