Zach Wade

Zach Wade is Vice President, Data Science, at LightBox, a leading provider of commercial real estate data and workflow solutions across the brokerage, investment, lending and environmental communities. He is responsible for creating new services that leverage LightBox’s technology to enable successful real estate decisions.

In his three years with the company, Wade has been instrumental in using data science to expand LightBox’s position as a leader in estimating the impact of climate change on commercial real estate, while introducing alternative data sets to the industry to resolve data asymmetries. These include quantifying the digital divide by creating a proxy for internet connectivity at the structure level.  LightBox is the first completely related property database to integrate data across address points, building footprints, sites and campuses and overall parcel data.

One of Wade’s achievements was leading the LightBox Labs team in overseeing technology innovations, such as leveraging natural language processing to make use of unstructured commercial real estate data pulled from PDFs and other documents, and creating models on GPS data to help increase real estate understanding beyond the typical—and sometimes incomplete—property sources. Wade also oversaw a partnership with First Street Foundation, which led to development of the first predictive and reliable property level climate-adjusted flood model. This is now in use by owners, investors, appraisers and lenders to better understand risk.

He also secured a U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) Cooperative Research Agreement to combine LightBox property and parcel data with remote sensed property characteristics, DOE building energy models, and climate-change scenario weather data to enable the estimation of greenhouse gas emissions for the entire U.S. building stock.

Wade holds an MSc. In Economics and Management from the London School of Economics, with Distinction, including an Award for Best Dissertation. He has also held several research positions, including at the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia University where he contributed to financial economics research on the mortgage crisis of 2008. Additionally, he held research positions at Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management and BuildFax.

These are just a few reasons we chose Wade as one of Connect CRE’s National 2022 Next Generation Award winners. Connect Media’s sixth annual Next Generation Awards recognize young leaders in the commercial real estate industry who are likely to be influential for years to come.