Kurz: “Our job is to provide the most accurate data to investors, but ultimately they are the decision makers.” Kurz: “Our job is to provide the most accurate data to investors, but ultimately they are the decision makers.”

LOS ANGELES—Providing data that’s timely and relevant to investors’ specific situations helps them make decisions that are based on facts—not feelings, Matthews Real Estate Investment Services’ SVP & national director of STNL Chad Kurz tells GlobeSt.com. MREIS is doing exactly that through their website that allows clients to instantly access data at any given time—simplifying the process with Box and e-signatures—and a new CRE publication, Matthews, that gives clients and readers research insight into different retail verticals, multifamily regions, and ongoing industry trends. We sat down with Kurz for an exclusive chat about how clients benefit from the data the firm provides and its publication as well as the importance of real-time data in effective decision making.

GlobeSt.com: How has a Matthews client actually used data to help with their investment decisions?

Kurz: A firsthand experience I had was with a client who owned a net-lease property outside of Georgia occupied by Advance Auto Parts. He was estimating sales from that property at 40% lower than the national average, but he had no data to support his opinion. So, we provided him with data related to store sales, tenant rent, market rent, etc., to help him make his decision about whether or not to keep the property. Turned out, he was right. We were successful in helping him not only market his property, but also sell it. About a year after he sold it, he and his wife drove by the property, and Advance Auto Parts was no longer there. He asked me what that property was now worth, and I told him it was estimated to be worth about $1 million less than what we sold it for. His wife said he was crying because his entire life savings had been poured into this property. It was purely an emotional investment, but by providing him with the data, we were able to preserve an extra $1 million of equity for him.

GlobeSt.com: In what ways do you provide new information and data as it becomes available?

Kurz: For us, there’s really two different ways: real-time data and batch data. Both types of information are vitally important to clients. We recently launched a CRE publication to provide data to our clients.  Typically research reports are done by an entire research department, but our own agents actually did the research. We focus on what’s important for clients, provide that specialized data, and help interpret what the data actually means for the past, present, and future. The publication provides an overview of each category, whether it’s single-tenant net lease, shopping centers, or multifamily. We broke it down even further into specific tenants.

GlobeSt.com: What are some of the key things you focus on with your CRE publication?

Kurz: We do a huge retail summit every year where we bring together developers, tenants, institutions and large landlords of retail-specific properties and ask what we can do to help. Reports are usually on globalization, but clients want to know specifically how tenants like Family Dollar, Walgreens or CVS are doing. So, we dug into meaningful data on those retailers for the client: where they’re expanding, how, whether they’re relying on developers, if they’re using single-tenant locations or shopping centers. We looked at turnover, average cap rates, rents and the correlation between the lease term remaining on the property and cap rates. If there’s an outlier, we dug into it. We looked at where product types were trending. For example, in casual dining, cap rates are compressing, but dollar stores are staying the same if not increasing. To write an article on just single-tenant net lease doesn’t give the owner what they need. This publication gives them meaningful information and we’ve received phenomenal feedback from retail summit attendees, clients, and readers.

GlobeSt.com: You mentioned earlier real-time data. Can you expand on this? 

Kurz: There are two perspectives on this: the seller’s and the buyer’s. People want to get information immediately—that’s the popularity of social media and Google—and the same is true of investments. For buyers, if they’re looking at a property, it could be 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., they want to be able to see it live. With our data, they can download an offering memorandum from our website at any given time and gain. access to property photos, rents, etc. A lot of people are relying on emails from brokers, but brokers don’t work 24/7, so if they want to look at something there could be a delay. Right now, I’m looking to buy a house, and when there’s not readily available information for me like the square footage of the rooms, it makes it really difficult. So, we try to make it as easy as possible for buyers.

Regarding sellers, we want to update them on what’s going on with their property. We allow brokers as well as owners to have access to information and data. They can track when someone opened an email related to a property or visited the property page. We provide true analytics and averages, and they can access that information at any given time.

Join Matthews at booth 141 during this year’s ICSC New York National Deal Making event.