Following its recent acquisition of Fathom Holdings, Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc. has announced a shift in its branding, now changing its name to Neighborhood Intelligence, coupled with a new Nasdaq ticker of NXH.
The formal change will take place on Aug. 17, as the company announced the shift in a letter to shareholders penned by Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Marcus Lemonis.
“As the company evolved, it became increasingly clear that the future would never be defined by a single brand, a single product, or even a single business, but by how intelligently we connected everything we do,” said Lemonis.
He continued on to explain that the company—complete with several other acquisitions beyond Fathom—has now organized itself around three pillars: Omni-Channel Retail, Home Services and Home Ownership.
In acquiring several companies under these three pillars, Lemonis said that good assets are “inexpensive at this point in the cycle,” and that “quality businesses are available at prices that will not be available at the other end of it.”
After the acquisition, Fathom disclosed the potential of “material misstatements” in previous financial reports due to “failures” of former CEO Joshua Harley and former-CFO Marco Fregenal. In a regulatory filing, the brokerage noted its recent financial struggles, outlining a turnaround plan that includes a year’s worth of “financial support” from Bed Bath & Beyond.
He called out how the acquisition strategy is specifically designed to cater to the market at any cycle, as “there are more than eighty-five million owner-occupied homes in this country, a population that grows every year, and each one is on its own eleven-year journey, needing to be furnished, maintained, improved, insured and someday sold.”
The lengthy letter appears to map out a larger strategy of seeking to dip into the entirety of the real estate/homeownership cycle, something other companies with deeper roots in real estate have toyed with, including behemoths like Zillow.
“We have not built this company on a material dependence on new home sales; we have built it on that growing population of homes, and we operate in the neighborhoods where that growth justifies the investment and the operations,” Lemonis continued. “Transactions are how families enter and leave the journey; the years in between are where most of the living, and most of the spending, happens, and our three pillars were built so that no part of the cycle finds us without a business in season.”
He also emphasized that the company is “not a consolidation or a rollup play,” but rather an “assembler and builder of capabilities with a unified mandate to make homeownership simpler and more affordable, and we do that through data and intelligence that remove coordination and cost while the business benefits from its own scale.”
The new name of Neighborhood Intelligence specifically represents how the expanded business model is focused around neighborhoods. As Lemonis stated, “every retail purchase, every mortgage, every title policy, every installation, every remodeling project, every insurance relationship, every service call and every real estate transaction begins and ends in a neighborhood.”
“Looking at our business through that lens changed the way we think about merchandising, marketing, services, financing, technology, and ultimately the customer experience itself,” he continued. “We don’t build one national strategy and hope it fits everyone; we build neighborhood strategies that can scale nationally.”
Lemonis added that the new name of Neighborhood Intelligence goes beyond corporate identity—“it encompasses the data we collect, the technology we build, the intelligence we apply, the workflows we redesign, the trusted brands we operate, the financial infrastructure we continue to expand, the blockchain and tokenization capabilities we believe will become increasingly important to the future of ownership, and, most importantly, the people who bring all of those capabilities together every day.”
