How do you know when a CRE software vendor is holding crossed fingers behind its back? When it says there's no trouble pulling together all the disparate data you need to analyze.

There's no reason why these companies should be any different than the thousands that preceded them throughout the entirety of the computer industry. Beyond the aggravation of making data connections between different systems, the challenge is, as Trepp puts it in a new white paper, "when good data is mixed with other good — but slightly different — data."

The problem is a challenge in any industry and particularly thorny in commercial real estate. Such property data as boundary lines, unit size, and zoning come from municipal records and third parties. Debt records come from sources like Trepp and other specialized data brokers. Property comps, rental rates, vacancy rates, and demographic information come from a variety of sources, including data providers, first-hand collection, and reports. Then there's such internal data as marketing records, forecasts, accounting tools, and analytic systems.