Real estate investment decisions require assembling data from multiple fragmented sources: public records (ownership, liens, permits, tax assessments), market transaction data (comparable sales, lease rates, cap rates), demographic and employment trends, zoning and land use, environmental records, and physical property data. For a single commercial property, assembling a preliminary investment memo typically takes a research analyst 8–16 hours.
The fragmentation is the problem, not the complexity. The analysis itself — applying cap rates, modeling cash flows, identifying risk factors — is well-understood. The time cost is data assembly: navigating county recorder websites, pulling comparables from multiple MLS and commercial databases, and reconciling information from sources that use different property identifiers and inconsistent address formats.
HouseCanary's research shows that the median time from deal identification to initial underwriting decision in commercial real estate is 3.5 days. In competitive markets, that lag is a competitive disadvantage — deals close before analysis is complete.