It’s CRE Benchmark Season, Here’s Why You Should Care

Benchmark data is an important tool in any industry. You can see how your performance compares to others and identify where changing practices might make you more competitive.

The National Apartment Association (NAA), Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM), and Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) recently announced that they opened automated benchmark submissions in partnership with Lobby CRE.

“In 2022, the initial partnership with NAA and IREM resulted in an unprecedented 9,600 submissions from real estate operators nationwide,” a press release said.

BOMA is a new addition this year and has more than 50 years of data to contribute, Lobby CRE CEO Anne Hollander tells GlobeSt.com. BOMA has more than 50 years of data to add.

Getting data can be expensive because it frequently sits in the hands of private companies that understandably want to make a profit. Madison Condon, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Law, has written recently, for example, that climate risk data is “limited and expensive to access” and also opaque, making verifying its accuracy or potential biases next to impossible.

“A lot of this data with regard to a benchmark is often siloed inside of a large analytics organization,” says Hollander, further noting that third parties scrape the data and then resell it. “We’ve taken a more holistic approach and made it available.”

Operators who submit their own data get market or submarket data in return for free if they belong to one of the organizations. If not, Hollander says that data is available for fee low enough that property managers on site can likely use it.

“It’s not only the understanding of your performance, but the ability to create a more specific roadmap,” Hollander adds. “What is a budget for a property? How do I protect cash flow? How to I optimize expense? This is game changing for a lot of organizations we work with.”

The Lobby CRE contribution is a system that works with “eight different property management systems that cover about 95% of the market.” The data is anonymized, and Hollander claims it can’t be worked back to individual contributors.

Data security includes “financial-grade encryption processes and tools” and “portfolios with more than 20 properties can utilize Lobby CRE’s VIP submission process with a dedicated Client Success Manager to help ensure all properties are properly submitted,” according to the release.