Real Estate

Over the past two decades institutional investors have experienced increased allocation to “alternative” private‐market assets like commercial real estate (CRE). Indeed, CRE comprises an estimated at $23 trillion in total value in the United States alone with roughly $8 trillion considered to be of institutional investment quality. With the growing allocations to CRE, investment professionals increasingly need access to quantitative tools and transparency on par with the other portfolio asset classes.

The Commercial Real Estate Data Alliance (CREDA) is a consortium of academics and industry professionals dedicated to achieving data parity with other major asset classes. Specifically, we believe that improved access to and understanding of available data in commercial real estate is key to fostering higher quality research and interactions between academia and industry, to the benefit of the entire CRE community.

CREDA is currently leading several new research data initiatives:

1. We are nearing the end of Phase I of a three phase initiative to coordinate access among commercial data providers and academic researchers:

• Phase 1 – Feasibility study to identify a limited sample of properties about which a variety of willing data providers have information. Primary goals are to assess the level of consistency across datasets and the feasibility of merging diverse data sources. We also seek to identify a set of important research questions to be explored in subsequent phases
• Phase 2 – Scale the merging of datasets to obtain a large enough sample for meaningful academic research (e.g., 5,000 properties)
• Phase 3 – Scale to full datasets

2. Merging permitting and capital expenditure data for a large sample of U.S. commercial properties using proprietary data sources. More

3. Launching a data merging methodology initiative based on the Unique Building ID (UBID) concept by the Department of Energy in conjunction with LightBox to be posted sometime this summer.

4. Studying the impact of climate risk on CRE debt underwriting partnering with LightBox, FirstStreet.Org, and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Further details on CREDA’s efforts are available in the report “Commercial Real Estate Data: Towards Parity with Other Asset Classes”. More

Affiliates