Clear Capital relocates to spur growth

Kevin Marshall founded Clear Capital in Truckee in 2001. Since then, the real estate valuation and analytics firm has grown to 340 employees working in Truckee, Reno, Sacramento and remote locations across the country.

Moving the company’s headquarters to downtown Reno to better position it for additional growth is the next step for Clear Capital, which last week announced its relocation to the 14th floor of Park Center Tower at 300 E. Second St.

Clear Capital, which was co-founded by Duane Andrews, provides real estate valuations and compiles data sets for mortgage industry and real estate insight that’s used by heavyweights such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as hedge fund managers and loan servicers, Marshall said last week at the company’s new location in downtown Reno. Clear Capital expects to have the 14,000-square-foot space ready by March.

The company’s location in Truckee proved ideal for its early-stage growth — Marshall has parlayed Truckee’s proximity to Lake Tahoe skiing and recreational opportunities into a primary recruitment tool to draw talent from both Reno and the Sacramento Valley and San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Sierra Nevada has a really unique demographic,” Marshall says. “People come up to ski and recreate here after college, but then they leave to get a job and start their career. We offered career jobs and the skiing, but as we grew we started to outgrow the talent pool.”

Clear Capital has a long history of hiring new graduates from University of Nevada, Reno that have helped it extend its brand, Marshall says, and the move to downtown Reno gives the company a larger reach into that pool of talent. Clear Capital also chose to relocate its headquarters to northern Nevada because the region leaves a lasting impression on future clients, Marshall says.

“Our clients love coming in here,” he says. “We fly in executives from every major bank and the hedge funds, they drive through the mountains, we go to restaurants in Truckee, Tahoe and Reno — they have a perception of Reno as having a lot of foreclosure activity. But the foreclosure boom is over, and there is a lot of business activity. The national lenders see that there are a lot of good things going on in Reno.”

Marshall says that national mortgage lending activity currently is slumping due to new laws coming into play that have lenders sitting on the sideline. Once the major banks and lenders figure out how to operate under new regulations, Marshall expects them to increase lending activity over the course of the next few years. Clear Capital’s move to a larger market allows the company to staff up in anticipation of that growth.

“We are looking two or three years down the road, and I really need to add 100 people,” he says. “There are times when I have two or three months to bring in tons of people, get the square footage, the desks, get them trained. Being in Reno gives us better access to more talented, hard-working folks and allows us to quickly scale up when our clients need our products.”

In addition to entry-level workers, Clear Capital seeks database administrators, computer programmers, statisticians, data scientists and operations and HR managers. The company expects to employ up to 400 workers in Reno and will invest $1.7 million to renovate its offices and add technology infrastructure.