The Altos Research Story

We started working on the algorithms that power our analysis in 2002. With each of us sitting on fat Silicon Valley mortgages and the tech market nuclear winter brewing all around us, we simply wanted to know what was happening to property values. But any research we could find at the time was based on old data and tended to be only regionally visible. Years later we can look back and see that property values in Los Altos sank by 20% during 2001 and that they didn't reach their past peak until 2005. But in the middle of '02, who knew? There had to be a better way...

Real-time Real Estate Market Intelligence

We set out to solve the problem that real estate market analysis (that is, intelligent interpretation of the raw data) is both highly latent and regionally aggregate. (You can get a "San Francisco Bay Area" overview from last quarter but what does that mean in Palo Alto or Sunnyvale, today? Turns out, it means very little.)

Real estate agents, and a number of free websites, will give you an estimate of the price of your home. While this is great information, to our way of thinking, it's not nearly enough - that price estimate can't answer questions like "What is the market doing?" In order to make decisions you need real-time analysis for your local area. Altos Research is in the business to help you learn the market. We focus on questions like, "So what?" and "Where are things heading?" Our customers have this kind of research and information in every financial aspect of their lives; and they hunger for it in their real estate decisions as well.

So after three years of tinkering and testing, we had a solid platform that was able to monitor local markets in real-time. Altos Research, LLC, was incorporated in 2005 and the company began in earnest.

Management Team

The Altos team has made a career of building systems that analyze huge amounts of complex data, find compelling patterns, and communicate those findings to a broad audience. With Altos Research we're applying those skills to the crazy world of real estate market information.

Michael Simonsen, Co-founder, President/CEO

Mike founded Altos Research with 15 years of software development and product experience. Most recently he was vice president of marketing and product management for network security systems vendor Nevis Networks where is named on two of the company's patents for applied cryptography in enterprise networks. Prior to Nevis, Mike ran product management at Inkra Networks and helped spearhead that company's networking systems into the largest data centers in the world. Previously Mike founded Potrero Software Corp. and was director of product management and marketing at Lucent's award-winning VitalSigns software unit. Earlier in his career Mike built eBusiness applications with Andersen Consulting (Accenture) and enterprise software for two smaller firms. He holds a BS from the University of Nevada an MBA from Chicago's DePaul University.

Jason Buberel, Co-founder, Vice President of Engineering

Jason is a hands-on engineering manager with 13 years experience developing large-scale Internet applications. Jason was lured from the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois to join a startup with members of the original Mosaic HTTP server development team where he built web applications for top consumer brands such as Hallmark Cards, Victoria's Secret, and Cars.com. He continued development of consumer-focused transactional and analytical applications for The Internet Shopping Network, TenSquare, and Xtime. Most recently, Jason has been developing network-centric mobile device applications. Jason has an BA in Biology from Illinois Wesleyan University and an MS in Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.