In other words, which tool is carrying your workflow on its back right now (Acq, Dev, and/or AM)?
Let's take out the obvious ones like Argus, Yardi, Excel, etc. I think my team has been relying heavily on RedIQ lately, and I have been hearing a lot about HelloData and Archer too.
I think I could honesty be pretty dangerous if I only had costar, excel, and a cell phone to talk to brokers
Excel and outlook
Google maps
Best developers I know are extremely talented and use super basic tools. Seems like the right combination. Excel, Project, Word, Outlook, Bluebeam. If you want to get fancy, Procore during construction, Yardi or similar for accounting (dev accounting and prop/operations accounting). If you need to do market research, aside from touring comps and walking with their property managers (best way to do real research and actually know your submarket), use Costar, Real Capital Analytics, similar to confirm rents and market trends. I am happy to hear the other side, but I really don't believe additional complexity is helpful. In fact, I think more complex software/tools/workflows actually slows down good developers. Just my opinion.
I agree 100%
I only need argus / excel / email tbh
I find costar useless
Argus cause the brokers and asset. Management/accountants still use it, Yardi for accounting, CoStar (may have its flaws but you still need it), and excel. Not gonna include the outlook/email, word etc. cause those are basics.
what CoStar flaws are you referring to?
Lease comp data sucks, property info is wrong a lot of the times, overall it’s better than all of its competitors but the data is never perfect. Also some of the functionality is just poor.
I see a lot of guys mentioning Costar. I had a subscription ~5 years ago and voted on it wasn’t worth it. Anything change since then?
~75-90% of my acquisitions are getting done quote on quote “off market” any given year. Whether that means actually transacting directly with a seller or a broker showing me an “off market” deal.
As far as market intel is concerned at the broad stroke level most major brokerages release free market reports in the markets I deal in or I know a broker who can feed me intel if I need to get more granular on a very specific area.
Has anything changed in the last 5 years? I feel like with AI, Costar even loses its edge as a time saving tool/data aggregation system. Has AI improved the product or made it less valuable? Stock price hasn’t looked good since AI became a buzzword but stock prices and real world implications don’t always match up. They obviously have a lot of data and I see a scenario where AI improves analytics on that data but in my opinion if you are waiting on Costar to get your data points you are late to the party.
Yeah it’s legitimately completely useless. Just talk to a broker lol.
Agree that it's not worth. Oftentimes have to do external research/AI to validate the Costar data.. or would just talk to a broker
SymmetRE.com without a doubt
Land.ID and Bluebeam.
I use landvision a lot
Personally I think all you really need is Excel and a cell phone especially for Acq and Dev. If you're working at scale then some fancier tools like you mentioned become more useful.
Apart from the big names I've also seen Cactus being mentioned alongside Archer and RedIQ. Can't say I've seen any for UK/EU markets though.
I don't think you should caveat this is by excluding basic tools.
If you need more than just Excel or Argus (or similarly ubiquitous software for property or construction management) you are in the wrong industry.
eh at scale yardi or something similar is a borderline necessity if you’re not outsourcing management
What percentage of owners do you think don’t outsource management? Especially at scale?
Yeah, Yardi definitely qualifies as "similarly ubiquitous software for property management." OP even called it out as on the same level as Excel or Argus
Claude is all i need
Real capital analytics is the best mainstream 3rd party data source imo that doesn’t get enough love. Provides loan servicer commentary and helpful loan origination metrics, and an intuitive sponsor-level profile that compiles transaction data.
On more of the edge, ClarityFirst by First American for recorded documents and county GIS maps for digging into asset-level info.
If you do office or retail the modeling is more about mastering Argus than excel imo
I assume for retail you mean shopping centers? I’ve bought a bunch of coupon clipper STNL with term and credit and repositioned a bunch of big box retail with less than optimal term/credit. We modeled it out in Excel but I think that was even overkill on these. Even the repositioning deals were essentially napkin math at the end of the day. Term/credit sucks, great location, attractive cost basis, below market rents, budget X for vacancy/TI/broker commissions, and recoup pretty much our entire initial equity check back on refinancing after we land someone with term and credit. Someone really trying to juice IRR could probably justify bringing in a bridge loan but if your anchor investor(s) have money parked in treasuries they usually can’t stomach bridge lender interest rates.
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