Frequently asked questions
- What is CanaRE?
- CanaRE is a monitoring service for commercial real estate investors. Once you add a loan, we identify the property, resolve who actually owns it through public deed records, and then continuously watch for signals that the property, borrower, or related entities may be heading toward trouble.
- Why monitor the sponsor in addition to the property?
- Trouble in a loan can start at the property level, and it can also start at the ownership level. If there are issues like capital constraints or management distractions at ownership levels, that often trickles down into investment performance. The problem is that many of these issues usually don't look connected, and CanaRE connects those dots.
- What signals do you track?
- At launch, two: federal litigation involving the borrower and related parties, and news coverage of the property, the sponsor, and their portfolio.
- Additional signals are in development. Please reach out hello@canarecre.com if you have signals you’d like us to track!
- Is this a credit rating or a score?
- No. CanaRE surfaces information and shows you why it may matter. We do not rate loans, predict defaults, or publish risk assessments publicly.
Who It's For
- Who uses CanaRE?
- Commercial real estate investors who need to stay ahead of portfolio risk.
- Why not CMBS?
- Securitized loans already have surveillance. Servicer reporting, Trepp, and the rating agencies cover that market well.
- Balance-sheet lenders have none of that infrastructure. If you're holding a whole loan, there is limited monthly reporting, often no third-party surveillance, and no one who will voluntarily tell you the property or the borrower is struggling. That gap is why CanaRE exists.
- Is CanaRE useful for equity investors or LPs?
- Our current product is built for lenders. The underlying problem — knowing signals that will affect a property before they become obvious — applies to equity investors too, and we've heard from that market.
How It Compares
- How is this different from CoStar, Trepp, or Moody's?
- Those are market data and securitized-loan platforms. They tell you what a market is doing, or what a securitized pool is doing. None provide clients with insights as to the meaning of the trends and why they matter for your investment.
- Can't I just set up Google Alerts?
- You can, and many lenders do. Two reasons that is suboptimal though:
- First, alerts are set on names you already know. If your loan is to Fleming Drive Holdings LLC, an alert on that name will never surface the sponsor's problems at three other properties held in three other entities. Connecting those is work done by CanaRE.
- Second, volume. A large borrower generates constant coverage, most of it irrelevant. Filtering that is a daily job nobody has time for.
- How is this different from what my analyst already does?
- It isn't different in kind — it's different in coverage and consistency. A good analyst can do this for the handful of loans they're worried about. CanaRE does it for every loan, every day, including the ones nobody is worried about yet.
Accuracy and Limitations
- Where does your information come from?
- Public sources: court records, county deed and property records, news outlets, and public agency filings. We cite the source of every item we surface so you can read it yourself.
- Does a signal mean a loan is going bad?
- No. A signal means something happened that a lender might want to know about. Most signals are not predictive on their own, and many resolve into nothing.
- CanaRE is designed to put information in front of you earlier. Our advanced systems and experienced team identifies relevant signals, and doing so is often enough to resolve issues before they become a problem.
- How accurate is the ownership resolution?
- We resolve ownership from recorded deeds and public property records. Those records are accurate as of recording, but they lag real transactions, and they reflect the recorded entity rather than the ultimate beneficial owner.
- Where we cannot confidently resolve ownership, we let you decide which entities are the ones you would like to track.
- What if the information is wrong?
- Public records contain errors, news reports are sometimes corrected or retracted, and entity matching is imperfect.
- Every item we surface links to its original source. If you believe something in CanaRE is inaccurate — whether you’re a subscriber or a party we’ve reported on — contact us at support@canarecre.com and we will review it promptly.
- Do you contact borrowers or sponsors?
- No. CanaRE aggregates public information. We do not contact borrowers, request information from them, or notify them that a lender is monitoring a loan.
Security and Confidentiality
- Is my loan portfolio confidential?
- Yes. Your loans, your borrowers, and your activity are visible only to users in your organization. We do not share, sell, or disclose customer portfolio data.
- Who can see my loans?
- Only users you invite to your organization. Loans added by one user are visible to others in the same organization by design, so a credit team shares one view. No other customer can see your loans or your risk assessments of them.
Coverage
- What geographies do you cover?
- CanaRE works across the United States for owner resolution and litigation. Coverage depth varies by county, because public records are maintained locally and digitization is uneven.
- Where a data source doesn't reach a property, we will indicate that we do not have coverage for that particular dataset.
Getting Started
- How do I add a loan?
- Enter the property address. CanaRE resolves the property and its ownership, identifies the related parties, and begins monitoring. Signals populate automatically.
- Can I import an existing portfolio?
- At the moment, loans are added manually. We are constantly building features, and the ability to import multiple loans via a CSV or Excel file is coming! In the meantime, if you need to upload a large number of loans please contact us for additional support.
- What does it cost?
- Please reach out to hello@canarecre.com for pricing and more information.
About the Company
- Who is behind CanaRE?
- CanaRE was built by professionals with backgrounds in commercial real estate finance, who spent their careers on the origination and credit side and watched the same monitoring gap go unaddressed.