Private Investors Surge Into Commercial Real Estate. Most Lack the Data That Institutions Take for Granted

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

16 Jul 2026

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Private capital is moving into commercial real estate at a pace that outstrips the research infrastructure most of these investors have access to. Institutional buyers have long relied on proprietary data, dedicated analyst teams, and relationships built over decades to understand a market down to the block level. A newer wave of private investors and independent brokers is entering the same deals without much of that apparatus behind them.

The gap shows up in specific ways: stale owner contact information, lease comps that go dark within a year of signing, and market reports that describe a metro or submarket but miss the more granular distinctions that actually drive leasing and pricing decisions. Closing that gap has become a live problem for a handful of companies building data and research tools aimed at commercial real estate’s broader, less institutional user base.

Crexi, one of the sector’s larger commercial property marketplaces, is one of several platforms working on this problem. Founded roughly a decade ago as a free-to-use listings platform, it has grown into a marketplace with nearly three million monthly active users, and has spent the past few years building a data intelligence layer alongside its listings business.

The Contact Data Problem

Prospecting in commercial real estate depends on knowing who owns a property, and that information degrades faster than most people expect. Owners sell, refinance, change property managers, or simply switch phone numbers – and none of that gets reflected in older records. A broker working from a list that’s even a year or two old can spend hours chasing contacts who are no longer reachable, or no longer own the building at all.

At scale, the problem compounds. A broker trying to prospect across a hundred properties in a given submarket isn’t just making a few calls – they’re manually verifying ownership and contact details for each one, often through public records, title searches, or cold outreach that goes nowhere.

Several platforms have built tools aimed at this gap, matching property addresses against ownership and contact databases to save brokers the manual work. Crexi’s version, a tool called Enrich, takes a list of addresses and returns updated property data along with owner contact information – phone numbers, emails, and related records.

Adam Siegel, Vice President of Product Growth at Crexi, points to the importance of updating existing contacts as much as finding new ones. “Things get out of date very quickly,” he says. “You can upload that address, and we can find you hopefully new information so you can get back in contact with them.” As long as ownership records lag behind actual transactions, brokers and investors will need some way to keep contact data current – whether through a dedicated tool, a data vendor, or manual diligence.

The Granularity Problem

Commercial real estate data often isn’t granular enough to be of any use. Market reports tend to speak in metros and submarkets, but the decisions investors and brokers actually make often turn on a much finer scale – sometimes the difference of a few blocks. A submarket-level vacancy rate or average asking rent can mask enormous variation within it, and that variation is often exactly what matters most to someone choosing where to lease or buy.

Consider a retail example from Los Angeles. The Mar Vista neighborhood has strong retail performance – healthy foot traffic, resilient tenants, competitive rents. Cross the freeway into an adjacent area, and the picture is markedly different – lower foot traffic, softer tenant demand, weaker rent growth – even though both locations might fall under the same broad submarket designation in a standard report. For an investor unfamiliar with the market, the cheaper rents on one side of that line might look like an opportunity. But if the location doesn’t align with where the target customer base actually shops or works, the lower cost could turn out to be the more expensive decision.

This is the kind of distinction that’s easy to miss when the available research stops at the submarket level, and it disproportionately affects investors and brokers without deep, boots-on-the-ground familiarity with a given market – often the same private investors who lack institutional research infrastructure.

A handful of platforms have built tools aimed at closing this gap, combining proprietary transaction and behavioral data with broader research sources to surface patterns at the neighborhood level rather than stopping at the metro or submarket. Crexi’s research tools are one example of this approach, pulling together its own marketplace data with outside research to give users a more granular view of a given area. The underlying need, though, extends well beyond any single company’s product: as more capital without deep local knowledge moves into commercial real estate, the cost of missing block-by-block distinctions becomes harder to absorb.

The Lease Transparency Problem

Another part of the problem is timeliness. Lease data has a short shelf life. Most lease comps remain reliable for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months before they stop reflecting current market conditions. After that, they’re more useful for understanding historical trends than for pricing an active deal. “It’s almost like an hourglass,” Siegel says. “The day the lease is signed, the sand starts to come out.” That decay creates a persistent problem for anyone trying to value a property or negotiate a lease in real time.

The practical stakes show up on both sides of a transaction. A broker preparing a valuation needs to know whether in-place leases are priced at, above, or below current market rates – information that shapes how a property is positioned for sale. A tenant negotiating a renewal or a new lease needs more than a going rate; they need a realistic sense of concessions, such as free rent periods or tenant improvement allowances, that similar tenants have actually secured recently.

Granular, current lease data was historically expensive to assemble, and largely available only to large brokerages and institutional research teams. That’s begun to change as more platforms build out lease databases for a broader user base – narrowing an advantage that once belonged almost exclusively to institutional players, and giving smaller brokers and investors a more realistic basis for valuation and negotiation.

A More Level Playing Field

Access to reliable, granular market intelligence was historically the domain of institutional investors – firms with in-house research teams, long-standing broker relationships, and proprietary datasets built up over decades. Independent brokers and smaller investors worked with whatever public records, personal networks, and secondhand market color they could piece together.

That gap is narrowing, driven less by any single product than by a broader shift: more data – ownership records, lease terms, neighborhood-level trends – is becoming available through platforms built for a wider audience rather than an institutional client list.

The timing matters. Private capital has been moving into commercial real estate at a faster pace than in past cycles, often without the research infrastructure institutions take for granted. As that data becomes more accessible, the two trends compound each other: more participants, armed with better information, tend to produce more competitive markets, more realistic pricing, and fewer decisions made on outdated or incomplete information.

About the Expert: Adam Siegel is Vice President of Product Growth at Crexi, a commercial real estate marketplace with nearly three million monthly active users. He joined Crexi after nearly twelve years in brokerage, most of them on capital markets teams at CBRE.

This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.