It’s a new year, but CoreLogic is still undergoing big changes, the latest a resignation of its CEO, Frank Martell.
The Irvine, California-based housing data company announced Wednesday that Pat Dodd — a onetime executive at television ratings giant Nielson — will ascend from his position as chief operating officer and replace Martell as CEO on an interim basis.
Martell’s resignation comes nine months after private equity firms Stone Point Capital and Insight Partners purchased CoreLogic for $80 per share in cash, or roughly $6 billion. The deal ended CoreLogic’s position as a publicly traded company.
It also followed a bidding war for CoreLogic, with CoStar making a pitch only to issue an 11th hour withdrawal. CoStar CEO Andy Florance stated that the timing was poor to move into the residential mortgage market.
Martell joined CoreLogic in 2011 as the company’s chief financial officer. He took over as CEO in 2017 following the unexpected death of then-CEO Anand Nallathambi from an illness.
In a press release statement, Martell declared that he is “proud to have created significant shareholder value by leading the transformation of CoreLogic in the past decade into a scaled leader providing must-have data, platforms and analytics that power the residential housing ecosystem. With the company operating at record levels and with a deep and talented leadership bench in place, it is now time for me to step back from my operating role.”
Unclear is whether Dodd will become Martell’s permanent replacement. Messages left with Stone Point Capital and Insight Partners on Wednesday were not immediately returned. Chuck Davis, the CEO of Stone Point Capital, did note in a prepared statement, “Pat Dodd brings almost three decades of proven leadership and value creation in the information services industry.”
This includes a 28-year-run as a Nielsen executive where Dodd, according to his LinkedIn profile, worked in Geneva, Switzerland; Shanghai City, China and Toronto, Canada.
Dodd takes over a business that defines itself as “providing information intelligence to identify and manage growth opportunities, improve business performance, and manage risk” in “real estate, mortgage finance, insurance, the capital markets, or public sector.”
One thing CoreLogic is known for is gathering proprietary housing data to develop an algorithm that can value residential property. Some real estate industry observers praise CoreLogic for having one of the more precise automated valuation models.
