Where Commercial Real Estate Data Actually Comes From
Five source families, each with a different refresh cadence, licence position and failure mode.
Data & analytics · 532 words · updated 2026-08-26
Every CRE statistic traces back to one of a small number of source families. Knowing which one a number came from tells you how fresh it is, how complete it is, and how much weight it can bear.
1. Public land records
County recorders, registers of deeds and their international equivalents hold deeds, mortgages, liens, assignments and releases. This is the authoritative record of ownership and encumbrance. Strengths: legally definitive, complete for recorded instruments. Weaknesses: coverage is county by county with no national standard; formats range from modern APIs to scanned images; entity-level transfers that move ownership without a recorded deed are invisible; recording lags the transaction by days to months.
2. Assessor and cadastral records
Assessors maintain parcel geometry, land and improvement values, building characteristics, and tax history. Strengths: parcel-level coverage of the whole built environment, updated on a known annual or biennial cycle. Weaknesses: assessed value is a tax construct, not market value, and the relationship between them varies by jurisdiction and by statute; building attributes are often stale; parcel and building are not the same thing, so a multi-building campus or a condominium regime needs careful handling.
3. Regulatory and statistical filings
Securities filings, bank call reports, CMBS servicer reporting, business registries and national statistical agencies. Strengths: standardised, audited, free. Weaknesses: aggregated to a level that often hides the property; reporting lags of one to two quarters; only covers entities within the reporting perimeter.
4. Geospatial and infrastructure layers
Zoning, land use, flood hazard, wetlands, pipelines, transmission, transport networks, environmental sites, opportunity zones, soils and topography, published as web services by federal, state and municipal agencies. Strengths: authoritative for the risk they describe, and increasingly served as live APIs rather than files. Weaknesses: publication is uneven — a well-resourced city publishes zoning as a live feature service while its neighbour publishes a PDF map; layers move and are retired without notice; projections and attribute schemas differ per publisher.
5. Market participants
Brokers, owners, lenders and occupiers, supplying listings, lease and sale transaction detail, tenant rosters and availability. Strengths: the only source for anything not recorded — asking rents, concessions, sublease availability, space-level detail, deal terms. Weaknesses: voluntary, so coverage correlates with who benefits from disclosure; asking rents are quotes, not transactions; self-reported data needs verification against recorded evidence wherever the two overlap.
The practical consequence
Any market statistic is a blend. Vacancy comes from participants, inventory from assessors, transactions from recorders and participants, risk overlays from GIS. So the honest presentation of a CRE number carries three things with it: what it measures, where it came from, and when it was last refreshed. A dashboard that shows a figure without those three is asking to be trusted on faith.
It also means coverage is legitimately uneven, and saying so is more useful than smoothing over it. A market where the assessor publishes a modern API and brokers report actively will support parcel-level analysis; one where records are scanned images and disclosure is voluntary will support a directional read and no more. RealStarGlobal publishes its jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction retrieval model, refresh cadence and licence position in the data sourcing plan rather than presenting uniform confidence it does not have.