Moody’s REIS Network Reinvents How CRE Professionals Obtain Crucial Market Data

During a recent webinar hosted by Commercial Observer’s Partner Insights team, Harry Blanchard, Director of Business Development with Moody’s Analytics, discussed the formation of the REIS network, which is effectively “an app store for commercial real estate.”

“Commercial real estate has been dominated by a handful of vendors, and the information has been very segmented,” Blanchard said. “We’re bringing our applications — not only Moody’s organic applications, but also third-party applications — into the REIS Network.”

The network is connected by an intuitive search functionality that queries CRE data and workflow tools. Users have access to complimentary data and may elect which “apps” or partner sets to subscribe to.

“It’s API driven, so information is transferred digitally from one application to another,” Blanchard said. “Previously, a CRE professional would have to subscribe to several different services, copy and paste information from one application and try to retrofit it into another. Those days are over, as far as we’re concerned.”

Users can search for information on a particular address, city, state, zip code or even tenant, then see all the relevant information from the app network. Users can then subscribe to the apps they need a la carte.

Blanchard was joined on the webinar by Ben Abrams, Associate Director of Customer Success with Moody’s Analytics, and representatives from two REIS Network partners: Allen Benson, Chief Information Officer with Catylist, and Matt Partridge, CEO of Infabode.

Abrams explained that the REIS Network currently has 12 partners whose data covers a wide array of information including (but not limited to) “new construction and market forecasts, market trends, property-level information, lease and sale comps, environmental data, credit-risk models, economic data, news, retail site-selection intelligence and commercial location score, which is the desirability of a particular location through several different factors.”

Benson affirmed that Catylist’s Commercial Exchange app is an “all-in-one solution for the industry.”

“We provide a fully researched platform where we have our researchers tracking information on buildings’ characteristics,” he said. “For example, in Los Angeles, we track all 198,000 buildings in the four-county area. We collect all the characteristics on those properties and put them into our database.”

Benson also explained that his service tracks not just properties, but CRE professionals as well. “In Houston, for example,” he said, “we are tracking all 9,100 commercial practitioners, people [who] practice in commercial real estate, or property owners [who] own commercial real estate.”

Partridge then provided an overview of Infabode.

“There’s a fantastic amount of information out there, but there didn’t seem to be a platform where you could easily see an overview of everything that’s happening in a particular sector or location,” he said. “So the idea behind Infabode is to bring all of this information into one place.”

Users can subscribe to receive information for the particular sector or location they need, and the companies offer various levels of participation, from simply receiving polls or market news to obtaining full information via an API.

Looking ahead, Blanchard said that Moody’s is “effectively talking to every sector prospect to see where we can find synergies, and where we can find both quantitative and qualitative information that’s going to help a CRE professional do their job more efficiently.”