REITs: Treasure Troves of Real Estate Data
As public companies, REITs report significant details about their operations and holdings. While equity investors care about REITs’ NAVs, FFOs, and other financial metrics, real estate firms can also benefit from this publicly-available information, but only if they know how to extract and visualize insights from the underlying filings and data.
In this article, we look at a case study for some of the ways REIT data can be used to shape acquisitions and leasing strategies. We will also show you how Predictre — the competitive intelligence platform for the commercial real estate industry that incorporates mapping, analytics, and allows you to combine your various data sets — empowers real estate firms make better, faster data-driven decisions.
Acquisitions Strategy
As a result of SEC filings, real estate firms can easily tell where their public competitors are buying and selling. For example, in early 2020, Highwoods Properties (HIW), an office REIT focused on the southeastern US, sold a huge chunk of its portfolio located in Greensboro, NC.
If you wanted to know how many square feet they have remaining in each of their target markets and what their basis is on each of those properties, you could spend a huge amount of time scraping their public filings, composing an Excel, and then presenting the chart below.
Highwoods remaining holdings by market
That would be a valuable one-time analysis, but without integrating that data into a system that you can easily access, visualize, and update over time, you don’t know where each property is. Furthermore, you will likely only be adding to the sea of static, disconnected spreadsheets of sales comps, lease comps, and market data your company already struggles to maintain and saves somewhere on your shared server.
But with Predictre, everyone on your team has access to the analysis based on data you capture and edit over time, ensuring that your company always has the most current, correct information at your fingertips.
Leasing Strategy
Highwoods holdings in the Raleigh-Durham area
As you can see on this map, Highwoods has a large presence in the Raleigh-Durham region. By analyzing their filings and website, you can determine these assets’ basis, average occupancy, in-place rent, and tenancy. Again, this data can be gathered and analyzed in Excel, but it is difficult to see the relationship between buildings, tenants, other owners, and the path of rent growth over time when the data is in rows and columns rather than on a map.
With Predictre, you can analyze trends at the level of a company, building, submarket, or market, to ask questions such as: “Has this building been outperforming the submarket as a whole and for how long?” or “What tenants in this building have locations elsewhere in the market or around the US?”