Cotality is more than a name — It’s a vision

A conversation with Patrick Dodd

Like property, companies go through their own life cycles. They evolve, adapt, and transform over time to push beyond expectations and define their future. That’s exactly what happened at Cotality. In this episode of Beyond the Buildings, Patrick Dodd, president and CEO of Cotality, shares a candid conversation with host Maiclaire Bolton Smith about how a name change isn’t just cosmetic — it’s a signal. A signal that something fundamental has shifted.

Following years of reshaping internal culture, investing in cutting-edge technology like CoreAI, and aligning around a “client-first” mantra, the global company formerly known as CoreLogic knew it had outgrown the name it carried for 15 years. The launch of the name Cotality — unveiled in March at the Intrconnect insurance event — marked more than just a rebrand. It marked the beginning of a new chapter, with a sharpened focus on collaboration, innovation, and delivering intelligence beyond bounds^tm.

In this episode, Dodd explains what drove the change, why now was the right time, and how this new identity honors the past while boldly stepping into the future. From the collaborative naming process to the careful crafting of the mission, vision, and values statements, he gives us an inside look at how Cotality came to be and where it’s heading next.

In this episode:

• 2:31 – Who is Cotality?

• 5:38 – Why was the CoreLogic brand changed now?

• 9:30 – What have been the reactions to the rebrand?

• 13:19 – How was the name “Cotality” selected and what does it mean?

• 20:37 – Where will the Cotality brand take the company?

• 24:31 – Erika Stanley looks at the numbers in the housing market in The Sip.

• 25:25 – Why is it important to be people-centric?

• 29:17 – Patrick Dodd explains when he will feel like Cotality has achieved its mission.

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Transcript

Patrick Dodd:

It is quite amazing when you can now move with our information and that just widen the aperture of the types of insights even beyond the home to the neighborhood and the boundaries, hence the beyond bounds, and that opens up a whole different set of clients that we can help in many ways.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Welcome to Beyond the Buildings by Cotality. I am your host Maiclaire Bolton Smith, and I'm just as curious as you are about everything that happens in the property industry. On this podcast, we satisfy our collective curiosity, explore questions from every angle and look beyond the obvious. With every conversation we illuminate what is possible. Just like homes and properties, companies go through transformations. Often this begins on the inside. As a culture shifts, a new focus emerges to influence work that's happening. Eventually, a transformation can become so profound that a brand needs to catch up to reflect a company's fresh perspective and innovative ideas to the world. So when a well-known brand changes, it's worth understanding why. On March 24, CoreLogic became Cotality. The Core Conversations podcast became beyond the buildings, and we're here to tell you why. For those of you who are longtime listeners, we hope you enjoy our fresh take. For those of you who are new here, welcome and thank you to everyone for joining us as we sit down with our CEO Pat Dodd to shed some light on our new brand, explain how we got here and chat about what this means going forward. Pat, welcome to Beyond the Buildings.

Patrick Dodd:

It is fantastic to be here. Thank you very much for having me with you today.

Erika Stanley:

Before we get too far into this episode, I wanted to remind our listeners that we want to help you keep pace with the property market. To make it easy, we curate the latest insight and analysis for you on our social media where you can find us using the handle @Cotality on LinkedIn and Facebook and @CoreLogicInc. Everywhere else. But now let's get back to Maiclaire and Pat.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

All right. Okay. So those who have been listening to us for a long time have noticed that our podcast has changed since our last episode, but that's because so has our company. So can you just start by talking to us a little bit about who we are as Cotality and how this brand better articulates the company that we've become?

Patrick Dodd:

Maiclaire, just like properties around the world, companies go through transformations as well. We always talk at our company about just the life cycle of properties, no matter if they're residential or office or multifamily and trying to get around the entire property itself. But our company has also gone through quite a bit of change. I think all the Cotality team members over the last few years. It's been about four years since I've been able, over four years since I've been able to join the company and I can't tell you all the great work that's gone into shaping where we are today. Not that we are done, but I think it starts on the inside of the company but also on the outside. And we've, myself and the executive team and all the senior leaders, we've put a huge focus on what I would say, transforming on the inside as it relates to reshaping our culture, building an A team, becoming a high performing B2B company that serves our clients every day, combined with this client first mantra that we've been having to make sure that we really do understand property professionals no matter where they sit on the globe or which sector of the property ecosystem there are. And what I was hearing this combined with our investments over time, I've just been hearing a slightly different posture around our company internally and externally with our clients about how we're behaving, what we're bringing to market. And I think the transformation is being felt even though we are not done. And that was sort of the impetus about seven months ago when this concept of changing a name that has served us extremely well for so many years, but we're fundamentally a different company than we were 15 years ago when CoreLogic was born originally, and it wasn't that long ago, 15 years if you think about it in the life cycle of a corporate brand, but there was enough out there where we really saw this as a catalyst for innovation. If I have to really think about what this pivot point means for us is the world is changing quickly out there. We've been very fortunate. I can talk to you a little bit about some of the investments and where we've been putting our time and money and time and money are two important things these days in any business, but it's fundamentally different to where we were a few years ago. So it's signaling another posture towards innovation and really understanding our end markets even more so we can bring datas and solutions to each one of them.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

And I mean as somebody that is on the inside, I've been here for nearly 15 years and I can attest to the fact that it has changed so much on the inside and the interactions that I have with our clients. I see that people are seeing this, that we are becoming a different company. And I guess Pat, the real question that many are asking is why now? Why was now the opportune time to shift when we have been evolving over the last number of years?

Patrick Dodd:

Yeah, I think a number of things provided myself and the board, let's call it the courage to sit down seven or eight months ago because these things don't just happen. A lot of hard work has gone into the renaming of the company the last few months. We've done it at record speed, by the way, in my view, relative to the reach that Cotality has around the world. But a few things I talked about a few earlier around a little bit about our culture and the A team, and that goes towards all the work we're putting into our data science teams, our weather science teams, our engineering teams, and that's been quite important for the confidence of where we can go next as an organization and really rally around that. I think a couple areas that I am particularly excited about in terms of the future is a lot of hard work has gone into, and it took a lot of capital investments by the way to do this as we pivot towards being what I would call an information services company, serving the property ecosystem, making sure that we have built the best truth set around the largest asset class in the world being property and our property 360 information at the center of our company because as you said, you've been here 15 years.

This was a collection of amazing separate businesses in many ways. And the centralization of all this rich information in one platform called Araya, combined with us finalizing our multi-tenant cloud operating system because we have moved from 10,000 servers to zero over this timeframe, which is really a machine learning first multi-tenant cloud platform because when we think about some of the models that our clients depend upon and the rigor that needs to go into those models, you do need that type of scale with the amount of content we have. And all of that came to fruition last July, by the way. So if you think about the culture and then where we were sitting back in July, that's really when we pressed go and said it is time because now we can really start innovating. It's more of a product development workbench that we have here at Cotality in my view, than just a repository of content.

And as we upgrade all of our workflow tools, which we've put a lot of time and money in, we've invested at record levels the last three years to make sure that our software products and our data products together can serve different personas. That was a big change for us, and I think that's a lot more, it's a catalyst for innovation, truthfully, because if you're a product leader now at Cotality, it's all sitting there. You can come, we can co-innovate with our clients, think about different use cases because all the personas are different. And just think about our velocity of product development that's out there along with the new technology that's out there for us to take advantage of as well.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Yeah, a catalyst for innovation became a catalyst for launching something new us as Cotality. I love that. The official announcement happened on March 24 at our Intrconnect insurance industry event. You were there, you joined us to deliver the announcement. I'd love to talk a little bit about the reactions so far. I was there, I heard so many people just buzzing with excitement at the event. One of the things that was so exciting was people arrived to a CoreLogic event and during the announcement we rebranded the conference and everything, all the signage changed to Cotality, and when people came out, they were just astonished by all of a sudden this was a Cotality event, which was really just extraordinary to be a part of. But Pat, what are you hearing initial reactions from people in the industry, customers on the new name?

Patrick Dodd:

Yeah, it's a great question. It was a really exciting day to unveil March 24th, 2025 I think was the date in the morning. I thought it was very appropriate, particularly with the insurance industry there because that's been a major investment area for us the last few years. It's not a place that CoreLogic spent a lot of time on 10 years ago, by the way, we were still acquiring capabilities 10 years ago. So for me it was quite appropriate because it demonstrated particularly one of the very large and important segments that we serve deeply and we have for many years, but we have so many more capabilities now for that industry. I just wanted to

Lay that out. So for me it was quite special, not just because all client events are important, but this one in particular because of the momentum we're enjoying in that particular segment and all the new capabilities that we can bring. I need to go back though. I'm going to take you back before I get to clients. One of the philosophies the executive team and myself have been living by in my view, is this concept of we are a B2B company. We serve businesses of all shapes and sizes, big, medium, small, as many as we can. We're very fortunate to have 80,000 clients at CoreLogic around the globe that we serve, and we take that very seriously. But in a B2B world, this concept of inputs driving outputs is quite important. Meaning a high performance, highly engaged employee base usually leads to happier clients who are also advocates and getting there.

And there's a little bit of a chain here. And then usually good things happen after that as it relates to shareholders, that is the philosophy that has guided my career for 30 years. Not to say I've always been able to get that rhythm, but here at Cotality, it's something that we truly believe in. And the reason I'm going down this long rabbit hole here, sorry, before I'm not trying to duck your question, I promise you is the amount of work we did with our employee base to not only create the name, I was really pleased with the work that the employee base from our marketing and comms team to our senior leadership team, members of our board were involved as well as we went through the process, but we were able to unveil this to our employee base first with the leadership team in January and then leading up to it. So actually that was quite important to me because I believe that that was really important to get all that feedback because this is where people are spending a lot of their time. CoreLogic had a great reputation in many ways and we wanted to make sure we did it right.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

I know it was a very thoughtful approach though, Pat, and we had some internal brand influencers. There was a number of individuals that were actually part of the process of picking the name. And can you just talk a little bit about how all of that happened?

Patrick Dodd:

It is really interesting. Again, if I go back six or seven months before the launch, I think one of the areas that gave all of us confidence is we've been building up our marketing and comms competency and leadership team. And so I knew we had a set of pros that knew how to go about doing this work in a really professional way and a very thoughtful way. That includes bringing in a great agency, Siegel and Gale, that were true partners with us. But I really do need to give hats off to Christie Stegen in particular, our chief brand and communications officer for leading the charge. She was the CEO of this project over the last few months and really rallied all of Cotality around it to make sure that it was success. So she would give credit to a lot of different people, but again, this was her initiative to lead and it was just done professionally. It was a little hectic at times. I am sure. I know for sure. But hats off to Christie and the team.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Patrick Dodd:

But the overall feedback I think is being met very, very well by the way. One, if you think about the name in itself, I think we're unpacking it a little bit. People will remember it as Cotality. It'll take a while. 12 months from now, hopefully it's going to be a natural act for everybody or sooner.

But when you think about first the word Cotality, the full picture in terms of where we were and where we are right now and the comprehensiveness of what we can offer, I think that it's genuine, it's authentic. People can see that that sits there. And the cohort is really important around collaboration, cooperation, and that's really with our client base and users and our employee base. So that Cotality, it just seemed to fit when it's there and the code does give a slight little nod to CoreLogic's lovely history in terms of where it was. So most people, I think the Penny's dropping for a lot of people about what the name is. I do have to say the tagline is getting as much red carpet for me as the name itself in terms of intelligence beyond bounds, those words and syllables, believe it or not, a lot of time and attention went into the tagline as well that goes into this. We had to make sure these words work globally. We had to make sure they were pressure tested and we could make sure there were trademarks on these things. But actually the intelligence beyond balance is getting almost as much red carpet in terms of the feedback back to me from employees and clients. And there's a bit of an aspirational touch to it, but it's also a credible touch in terms of how we operate today.

And that was quite important to us as a team, that it needs to be credible and authentic, not a bunch of propaganda, but does it fit what we do and how we do it. So that's where we're on the, I don't know how you feel about both that both Cotality and the intelligence beyond bounds, but that seems to be the feedback I'm getting. The two together seems to make things pop a little bit.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

I agree. The intelligence beyond Bounds just resonates so deeply with not just us internally, but with our customers and our clients and our partners and people that work with us. They're like, this is it. It really does embody who we are. What surprised me, what joy me to see was that our customers and our clients and our partners instantly started using Cotality. And I haven't heard one person slip up since the announcement, and I think it's because it generated so much excitement both internally and externally. People were really excited about something new and just to see the amount of social engagement on social media that we had following the interconnect event and the announcement and everybody just jumped right in fully with using Cotality. And I think that really does say that we got it right, that we did something that does describe who we are as a company.

Erika Stanley:

If you haven't had a chance to meet Cotality yet, come say hi. We help you see property from every angle by analyzing the nuances behind billions of data points across the globe. A link to learn more is in the show notes.

Patrick Dodd:

And you'll recall from this is a year ago we launched our new mission, our vision and our values, which also was a very important piece of work for us.

And I think it's always really important to remember that what we are doing here is we're taking the best parts of CoreLogic and adding to it. That's really what this is about. It's not about forgetting the past, so many good things with there, but there's a number of things that we have. Shed be it certain business units or certain protocols we have in the company, and then we're just adding to it and trying to think about what's best in class for our employees and our clients to move forward. And I think that's important and that's why the mission of making the property industry smarter, faster, that word more people-centric touches it back to intelligence, by the way. So there's a lot of other companies out there talking about humans in the loop. Intelligence is really what we are because when you start taking a truth set, firing it through, which I call the high octane fuel and start pumping that through the combustion engines of our workflow tools, or if a client wants the data directly, we want to serve them. So the word intelligence is quite an important one. It has a huge people element. It's not just artificial intelligence, it's intelligence. And it's the combination of deep industry knowledge combined with the best software and data available, both of them to make the industry smarter and faster. And that people-centric piece is a big piece of what goes there. And the beyond bounds is what can be done when you build a truth set that you can count on without hallucinations running it through major machine learning algorithms. You don't know what you can create in terms of a lot of things. It's not just taking things and making them. A lot of people talk about touch time and cost out. That's important because we want to get rid of the mundane and the routine and make sure machines can do this appropriately and responsibly. But the bigger thing for me is what problems could not be solved before that weren't even feasible because the cost and the time was just way too long. All cycle times are shorting right now. They're shortening so fast. And that's exciting about the journey we're on here is actually answering questions that honestly were not answered before. And I think that's the opportunity that Cotality has now in front of it.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

And I love that so much, Pat, and I think that that takes us in a good direction, given us a lot of context on the history and the historical context of who we are. And a lot that's changed since you became our CEO in 2022. But where do you think now as Cotality, where do you think this brand will take us and where do you think it can take us? I really do feel like the future is endless for us.

Patrick Dodd:

Yeah. Well, I'm going to say number one, I'm going to go right back to our clients in particular that we have today. I actually think the products and services that our clients are going to be consuming will be getting much. I don't see a big difference in the world today between B2B software and B2C software as consumers. And so there's a huge opportunity to make it just easier to do business and get to the answers quicker, be it, it's through our platforms or the way that we can render our content and our analytics through theirs. And that's a huge lift for people because that creates capacity for them to do their best work and to eliminate those things. So before we get into new areas, I still see about a good majority of the benefit of where we're headed next is just our clients should be getting a much better client experience. We have to challenge ourselves every day. Are they getting the best from us? So that's number one before we move into new vectors and new areas. But number two, what's really interesting right now is a property we've been doing a lot of work on really understanding the three, everything you need to know about a physical structure.

We've been hard at work on that and we need to keep going. We call it Property 360. I challenge our product teams that we're really at Property two 80 and there's still so much more content we can bring in so much insight. That's our internal, right? There's so much more for us to be able to do and we're doing that today. What we're doing, and it's going to help the insurance sector, it's going to help our lending clients, it's going to help our real estate clients. But some of our aerial imagery that was demonstrated, that is another set of data sets that we can just

Do even more interesting work for all kinds of different industries. So that's an example of Property 360 is not stopping, and that's why I like calling it Property two 40 or two 80 because there's so much more we can do there. And I think that's really important. We want to focus on our core and then just add to it. But when you start thinking about a property, you start thinking about neighborhoods, you start thinking about the next set of neighborhoods that are ripe for single family, the next set of properties that are land that's ready for multifamily units. Given the affordability and housing crisis that we have here, shining a light for companies, were the best place to build for all kinds of reasons. Let's call it their electricity grids or telecommunications companies. It's quite amazing when you can now move with our information and that just widen the aperture of the types of insights even beyond the home to the neighborhood and the boundaries, hence the beyond bounds. And that opens up a whole different set of clients that we can help in many ways. Doesn't matter if it's telecommunications, retail, think about neighborhoods. If you start thinking about Cotality as a neighborhood company, not just a property company, that opens up the aperture a little bit in terms of where we can take our data and insights a little further.

And it helps with a lot of municipalities as well.

Erika Stanley:

It's that time again, Cotality just dropped new numbers about what's happening in the housing market. Here's what you need to know. Everyone wants to know how the new federal tariffs will affect home prices. So while we routinely track the cost of building materials and labor in the us, we recently dug into how the Trump administration's tariffs are going to affect material prices. While we do expect commercial projects to feel a greater effect from these price increases, then residential construction, there will still be short-term implications across the board. This is especially true for restoration professionals In our deep dive investigation into these new tariffs, we go into detail about what we're seeing in how import tariffs will affect prices for Canadian wood products, Chinese steel housing fixtures and concrete. To find out more about the future of pricing under tariffs, visit Cotality.com/insights. There's also a link in the show notes, and that's the sip. See you next time.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Wow. I mean, I love that concept. I love in beyond bounds. I love where we're going. You did mention a few times about this people-centric being so much a part of who we are, a part of our mission and really kind of the focus on how there's not a lot of difference between B2B and B2C. Now when you focus on the end user and you focus on the lives beyond the buildings and the people-centric, you say internally all the time here, Pat, that our clients are our North Star. And I think that that just kind of emulates that. And I guess are we seeing any other trends in the industry that are becoming more people-centric, that are aligned with where we're going and some of our thoughts there?

Patrick Dodd:

I'm not going to go fully down the AI and LLM route right now, or you and I can do another podcast on my views of how that's going to be helping property professionals. We will. But I do have to say one of the themes that keeps coming back out of many of the, it's amazing that the amazing people I get to meet, now that I have this title of president and CEO, guess what, I get to meet with other president and CEOs across lots of different industries. And because Cotality has such a good brand recognition, I am able to really get into some really interesting conversations with people.

That's great customer experience I would say is one of the areas that I talk to a lot of my client partners about, right? What are they trying to do with client experience because we are serving businesses so they can help their customers at the end of the day. So client experience, client retention, knowing the customer for life and also lead generation to help build their business. I think Cotality has always been very strong at helping clients minimize risk. And we will continue to do that because that's important in financial services. I think a lot of our many parts of the industry that we serve still have quite an element of what I call, they're still on their analog to digital journey and we obviously help there to help take time, touch and cost, which does give client experience by the way. But I think one of these areas that's really important right now is how do we help these major incredible companies think about just improving their retention rates by 1% or 2%? How do we help them think about their next customer and how to offer their products and service to them? And data and information when used well can really be super helpful in this situation. So that is just a common theme that you're going to start to see many more things coming from Cotality, Not just on helping manage risk, not just on helping take time, touch and cost out, which is huge by the way, because in this industry, minutes equals millions. Imagine one person if you can just shorten their cycle time by five minutes, just the size of the number of transactions that need to get done. Minutes equals millions on that. But customers are everything holding onto customers, knowing them better, understanding and trying to predict their next major life event, their next move. And we have a lot sitting in Cotality that we are actually bringing to market over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months to help on that. I'm quite excited about that. It won't be easy, but I think we have a right to win here

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

And it's exciting to be a part of this journey as we really go down this path. And I guess ultimately we are working at building a brand that helps build better lives and really does focus on that people-centric lives beyond the buildings, making people the center of everything that we do. Pat, if you had a crystal ball in this new era of Cotality, when do you think the moment is you'll step back and you'll say, we've truly been successful in achieving our mission?

Patrick Dodd:

I believe as an organization we'll know we are on the right track because the world changes, competition changes, technology changes. But when our clients talk about Cotality, when we're not in the room and say nice things about us that we've truly provided them an ROI on, either their cost, their risk mitigation or their growth, that's when I know we're on the right track unprompted. And when our competition is in there, those clients are saying, why can't you be more like Cotality? I don't understand. That's going to be my happy place, is when we get advocacy from our clients and they inspire our competition to say, why can't you be a little bit more like Cotality? Because they seem to be on the right track. Why don't you go talk to those guys? That'll be a happy day for me.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Well, I think ending on a happy note like that is a perfect place to end. So Pat, thank you so much for joining me today on Beyond the Buildings by Cotality.

Patrick Dodd:

Terrific. Thank you very much for the time. Appreciate it. You're doing a great job.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

And thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed our latest episode. Please remember to leave us a review and let us know your thoughts and subscribe wherever you get your podcast to be notified when new episodes are released. And thanks to the team for helping bring this podcast to life producer Jessi Devenyns, editor and sound engineer Romie Aromin, our facts guru, Erika Stanley and social media duo, Sarah Buck and Makaila Brooks. Tune in next time for another conversation that illuminates the ideas that will define the future.

Erika Stanley:

You still there? Well, thanks for sticking around. Are you curious to know a little bit more about our guest today? Patrick Dodd is president and CEO of Cotality, formerly CoreLogic, a role he's held since 2022. He joined in 2020 as the Chief operating and growth officer spearheading several key initiatives such as Cotality, global cloud, migration, data and analytics re-platforming in the launch of innovations, including the Arraya platform, climate risk analytics in the image analytics suite. Under his leadership Cotality has executed major acquisitions and expanded strategic partnerships globally and successfully rebranded from CoreLogic to Cotality, reinforcing the company's mission to unify property professionals, strengthen industry relationships, and drive innovation around the world. DO is leading Cotality cultural and technological transformation marked by rising employee engagement in Great Place to Work designations across six countries, the us, Canada, uk, Australia, New Zealand, and India. Before DOD served as global president and Chief Commercial Officer at Nielsen's, $3 billion Global Connect division demonstrating global leadership experience across roles in Asia, Europe, and North America. He currently serves on the boards of Bit Move in the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Housing Policy Council Executive Committee in the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Policy Advisory Board.

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