Evra

Context

Evra is the valuation and investment product inside Geophy. It consumes enormous amounts of property, market, and macroeconomic data to price multifamily and commercial assets. The users are analysts, asset managers, and underwriters whose day job is moving tens of millions of dollars of capital on the back of the numbers the product surfaces.

Research & discovery

I spent the first months riding along with underwriters across three firms. The pattern that kept showing up: they trusted their own spreadsheets more than any dashboard we gave them, because the dashboards abstracted the assumptions away. They would export our numbers, paste them into Excel, and rebuild the model from scratch just to see the inputs. Speed wasn’t the problem — trust was.

That reframed the work. The product didn’t need more visualizations; it needed provenance. Every number had to be traceable — what comp, what cap rate assumption, what macro series, what time range — and every assumption had to be editable at the point of use, not buried three screens away.

Approach

We rebuilt the valuation view around a layered disclosure model: headline numbers up front, the driving assumptions inline, and the underlying data one click deeper. We collaborated closely with the data science team so model outputs carried confidence and explanation, not just point estimates. Decisions that used to require a call with an analyst could now be reasoned about in the interface.

Solution

The valuation surface — headline figures, the comps driving them, and the adjustable assumptions — arranged so the underwriter can stress-test without leaving the page.

Property-level views let analysts compare a target asset against the model’s peer set and interrogate why it was chosen.

Market views pull together the macroeconomic and submarket signals the model uses, surfaced so users can agree or override.

The portfolio view — for asset managers tracking dozens of holdings — flags movement and risk before it shows up in quarterly reporting.

Outcome

Evra became Geophy’s commercial anchor. The work contributed to Geophy’s acquisition by Walker & Dunlop for approximately $290M in 2022. Post-acquisition the platform continued under the W&D brand.

Reflection

The lesson I’ve carried since: for expert users, legibility of reasoning beats polish of presentation every time. Give analysts a transparent model they can argue with and they’ll trust it. Give them a black box with a beautiful chart and they’ll rebuild it in Excel.