Auction.com's Peter Muoio recently discussed how he became head of research at the firm and what he is seeing in the market. He discussed with us the overall economic trends he sees in commercial real estate and how that is impacting the transaction market. He also told us about what he his seeing in different commercial real estate sectors. Auction.com is a GlobeSt.com Thought Leader. Learn more about them here.

GlobeSt.com: How did you get involved with Auction.com and in this sector of commercial real estate?

Peter Muoio: I started the real estate research group at Bankers Trust beginning in the 1980s and ran that until Deutsche Bank acquired that firm. At that point I became head of global real estate for Deutsche Bank. Myself and my team provided real estate analytics reports to all of the various real estate platforms at Deutsche. That included CMBS, the real estate investment banking business and real estate asset management globally. We spun off as an independent company in 2002 with Deutsche as a launch client and then grew our business as Maximus Advisors as an independent real estate research firm to an array of participants in the commercial and residential real estate markets. That ran the gamut from Wall Street institutions like Deutsche and others, to opportunity and core funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, home builders, foreign banks and asset managers. Anyone who was involved in residential and commercial real estate on the buy side, the sell side or the debt side became clients of ours. We provided two sorts of things, which were an outgrowth of the kind of work we were doing at Deutsche. First was ongoing research -- what we thought was happening in the world, in the economy and capital markets and what it meant for specific real estate segments in specific markets. We also did tailored research. So if you are underwriting a piece of debt or purchasing or selling a real estate asset, we would do reports of varying degrees of depth on the market, the submarket, the property, etc. We would work on peoples' strategy pieces, portfolio analytics, investor letters and other things like that. We became part of CW Capital in 2008 and continued to grow our third-party business, but we also provided our research and analytics to various CW Capital platforms. It included the special servicer and the agency lender as well as the CDO manager business. When CW Capital was acquired by Fortress, we also provided our research into their platform, and when CW acquired Rockwood Real Estate Advisors, we took over providing the research for that business as well. CW sold Rockwood and Maximus to Auction.com and that transaction closed at the end of 2012, so we now formed the Auction.com research group.