Residential practitioners extract the majority of their “comp” information from one or more Multiple listing services (”MLS”) data sources. The basic data - property attributes, listed and sale price, commission paid, days of market, etc. are supplied by Realtors to a MLS service that maintains and redistributes the sortable information to subscribers whom belong to a realtor board for a fee.

Relevant commercial data is a different animal. First, commercial practitioners (CP) are not required to be a member of any state (C.A.R.) or national (N.A.R.) organization. This is not to say many CP don’t belong to one or more professional organizations (CCIM, SIOR, etc.) which demonstrate expertise through satisfying relevant educational, performance and professional requirements, you just don’t have to be a member of a regional, state or national board, and therefore not mandated to participate with any data sources.

Next, commercial real estate involves many property types - retail, office, industrial, land, leased investments, and each type having a wide variety of differences. Due to the shear volume and complexity of commercial real estate, a single “commercial MLS” source did not exist until recent years. Commercial property data was for the most part internally generated and difficult to acquire. The larger commercial brokerages would employ and maintain their own research departments. These larger brokerages developed and maintained historical data based on information received from their own agent’s in-house activity and supplemented by data acquired from cooperating counter parts at other competitive brokerages and tax assessor records. Obviously, the amount of time and capital required for data collection and analysis is substantial, so this data is considered proprietary and rarely shared except for quarterly or annual reporting released to major media for recirculation.

So if you own or work for a smaller commercial concern, where do you get relevant data? You must buy it from other sources. There are many sources for commercial market data - , CoStar, AIR (American Industrial Real Estate Association), Loop Net, Black’s Guide, etc. with some data sources more reliable than others. Depending on what information you desire and how accurate it is, you can get some basic information for free, but for the most part, you get what you pay for. Comprehensive commercial property information, comparable lease and sale data, analytical reports, etc. are only available for fee.

Fast forward - with the tremendous amount of data available to a commercial practitioner, what’s really important? Trends!

Over the past year, negative news about the economy and more important, challenges in the real estate market are common place and continue to affect our livelihood. But in a recent Business Press article, some statistical commercial data provided by three of the larger commercial brokerages, Grubb & Ellis, Lee & Associates and Marcus & Millichap is worth highlighting:

- Dave Geyer is a Certified Commercial Investment Member and REALTOR member of CVAR.