NEW YORK CITY—Earlier this spring, GlobeSt. reported a nervousness from institutional investors in commercial real estate. The logic, as explained by Preqin's Andrew Moylan, was that while the demand for CRE remains high, institutional investors are perplexed, because they don't know “where we are in the cycle” and whether or not now is a great time to be investing large sums.

They are having such a hard time answering this question because they don't have the right tools to properly analyze the growing number of data points that make up their portfolios.

That's right, more data points and more square footage. Over the last decade, I've watched institutional investment grow CRE to the point where it is now a designated asset class of its own. This growth has also made portfolios incredibly complex—and much harder to analyze.