The COVID-19 period will live long in the memory for all of us, even if it is only for setting individual records for not leaving the house. But as the days extend into weeks the need to try and continue with business as usual becomes more important. This is as true for Real Capital Analytics (RCA) as it is for any other company within the real estate industry, and being a data provider who needs to provide a 24/7 service the challenges of moving everyone to home working have been significant. While the first few days were challenging everyone has now settled into their own ways of coping and continuing to provide our clients with the information and service they expect and require.
Many comparisons have already been made with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) from just 10 years ago, and the potential impact on commercial real estate values and transactional activity. This downturn is obviously different to the GFC with plenty of capital available to be invested, financing providers and banks in relatively good health and many more participants across the real estate investment market. With the previous downturn still relatively fresh in people’s memories many groups are trying to position themselves to take full advantage of the recovery, which we all know will come even through the timescale is uncertain.
What we have found is that many groups are turning to timely, reliable data sources such as RCA to track what is going on in the market and to make sure they are aware of where opportunities may be emerging and who in their peer group is active around the world.
Over the last cycle the real estate investment market has become truly global, with investors just as likely to do a deal on the other side of the world as in their own country. This has made access to global information in one platform especially important, as groups may need to move with even greater speed to secure the best opportunities in the current environment.
One of the great advantages of the RCA platform is that it is updated every single day, which is very unusual in the real estate data industry. In addition, our data is all collected using one consistent global methodology so no matter which markets you look at you can compare the transactions side by side.
As the world starts to get back to some sort of normality and the evaluation of a building’s history becomes critical, the fact that RCA has been tracking transactional history since 2000 in many parts of the world gives a precise evolution of a building’s ownership and in many instances the financing as well.
RCA now has well over 1m transactions in our platform meaning we can do very precise analytics at the sub-market, city, regional and global level. We are able to track developed and emerging markets, to do city by city comparisons in a variety of countries and also look at how previous cycles have affected pricing and yields.
What we have seen since the COVID-19 situation began is that companies are focused on having the right information at the right time, and that is RCA’s speciality.
