Walker & Dunlop has long been a powerhouse in commercial real estate finance, with a $135.3 billion servicing portfolio (as of December 2024) and a reputation for leadership in multifamily lending. But behind the scenes, a bold transformation is underway, one that’s reshaping how data, technology, and business strategy come together to drive smarter decisions.

Helping drive that transformation is Dan Cromer, SVP of Product – Data at Walker & Dunlop and a key force within WDTech, the firm’s internal technology arm. With a product mindset and a passion for problem-solving, Cromer is helping shift the company’s data approach from siloed systems to connected insights, unlocking hidden value across teams, tools, and workflows.

In this insightful conversation with Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer at Securiti, Cromer dives into the real-world challenges of change, the promise (and pitfalls) of emerging tech, and why data is the universal input shaping every innovation — from AI to quantum computing.

Edited Excerpts

Q: Walker & Dunlop has been a successful business for years, but you’re bringing in a fresh perspective focused on data and technology transformation. What’s it like driving that agenda, not just within the tech and product teams, but also across the broader business units?

It’s great to see a company that’s so well respected and has truly established itself as a leader in the space, and that’s no small undertaking. Being able to bring a vision of what more we can do with data, and what more can be done with technology to augment that, gives us a platform we can build from. It allows us to take a fresh look at everything happening across the organization and see just how impressive the breadth and scale of all the different activities are.

One of the most impactful aspects of being a leader in the organization is having that top-down view through the data lens. You begin to notice how many different independent efforts are related, intersect with each other, or serve as precursors to one another. Often, the value comes from stitching those things together and creating connections, sometimes using elements that are already in place.

Q: How are people reacting to the change so far? What’s working well, and what’s been challenging?

You can probably ask this of any technologist. The moment the word “change” comes around, we think, “Oh boy, we’re already busy. How are we going to take on more? How are we going to look at things differently if we’ve already put a lot of time into designing the world as it is today? How do you find the time to design the world that’s going to be tomorrow?”

And that’s a tough problem, supporting what’s already out there while also trying to wrangle it into something new.

As we start to abstract problems, find connections, and realize there are major challenges everyone is trying to chip away at in small ways, we begin to see opportunities. If we can combine efforts and identify overlapping activities, suddenly it’s not just one person tackling a piece — now you’ve got two people building toward something bigger instead of everyone working individually.

Q: With so many rapid advances in technology, from AI to quantum computing, how do you decide which ones to incorporate? And how do you balance exploring innovations with getting the fundamentals of data right?

What inspires me is that across every single one of these technologies, data is the universal input. When we look at everything happening in AI, the input is always data plus compute, plus the algorithm. When we talk about quantum computing, you’re processing something, and that something is your data.

Once you recognize that data is the consistent input across all of it, it clarifies what the truly valuable asset is.

Now, when it comes to taking advantage of these technologies, there’s always a bit of a bandwagon effect at first, this torrent of new things that emerges until they eventually coalesce into use-case-driven, purpose-built technologies.

Coming to many data problems with that product management lens is always very helpful because you’re trying to match the use of a technology with a real-world problem, and you’re trying to do it in a way that empowers the person using it. It can get overwhelming when you try to use everything at once.

Also, it comes down to mapping those things you want to do, which tend to change much more slowly than the pace of technology.

We’re in the real estate finance business, and we know that’s going to be a constant. So, when you can make sense of what your constants are, what your assets are, and then identify new challenges or opportunities that you could take advantage of, it becomes easier to connect the dots and say, “Okay, I can’t do everything, but this is what I’m going to do.”

It’s a challenge of applying multidimensional thinking to the same problem.

CDO Magazine appreciates Dan Cromer for sharing his insights with our global community.