Commercial Real Estate Data: Towards Parity with Other Asset Classes

Commercial real estate (CRE) lags behind other major asset classes in terms of data availability and transparency. Limited access to usable data serves as a constraint on academic research and the subsequent development of practitioner tools. This paper summarizes the work of the Commercial Real Estate Data Alliance (CREDA) working group, investigating some of the currently available CRE data sources and focusing primarily on U.S. property-level data. The document identifies some of the challenges to the creation of a comprehensive historical dataset and offers some suggestions on how such challenges might be overcome. Also discussed are some concurrent initiatives aiming to address similar issues with CRE research data. This is intended to be a “living document” which will be updated as our understanding evolves.