Tax assessors tell you who owns a property, but not who's actually there.
We add more than 14 million building tenant/occupant names to the database from our own proprietary Tenants Database.
And most of the time, we know (and report) how long those tenants have been in business. It's a key indicator of rent-paying stability.
More than 25% of the time, local tax assessors describe a property as "general commercial", "tax exempt", or some other obscure language. What's really going on at these properties?
Is it a dry cleaner? An office building? A factory?
Using tenant data and owner information, we fill in many of the unknown building uses — and we change some where the local assessor has over-generalized or erred.
If you're a commercial real estate lender, you need to know about credit risk.
If you are an insurance company writing commercial property policies, you may suspect that credit risk correlates with claims. A financial risk score gives you the answer.
If you are thinking about buying a property, you may want to know about property-based risk — like a series of prior loan defaults under multiple owners, indicative of a bad location or other problems.
The Enhanced Commercial Property Database furnishes three different credit risk scores, each flowing from multiple regression statistical models.
See Commercial Property Risk Scores for more information.
Some tax assessors report building square footage. Some don't. And some report the square footage of just one building on a property that has multiple buildings.
The Enhanced Commercial Property Database utilizes a predictive model to estimate square footage when tax assessors fail to report it, or when they don't address all buildings on a site.
Unlike nearly all residential homes, commercial properties sometimes span more than one real estate parcel.
Public records report each parcel separately. So, how can you tell which properties span multiple parcels?
The Enhanced Property Database identifies these for you.
Using the identifying numbers, you can group multi-parcel commercial properties and look at the entirety of any property.
If you need to contact a building owner, you're often stuck. To what person do you address the letter? Who do you ask for on the phone?
Public records simply tell you who owns a building — often a corporation or LLC.
We add human contact names on more than 7 million properties.
Need to know what a commercial property is really worth?
The only real answer is a full appraisal — expensive and time-consuming.
But if you need a quick, general idea, tax assessors sometimes report a property's market value. And sometimes they don't.
They may report only the property's assessed value, often much lower than market value. When assessed value is the only value available, we compare that value to recent sales in the same vicinity. We then adjust the assessed value to an estimated market value.
We furnish a property value in the database — the reported market value or our adjusted assessed value.
Raw data do not tell you which commercial properties are owner-occupied and which are owned by absentee landlords.
Yet, for some applications, this is important information. So, we provide it with an owner-occupancy flag for each record.
We all tend to think of buildings by name.
Your spouse might ask you to stop at the 7-11 for a gallon of milk. You get gas at the local Exxon
station. You may have an appointment at Dr. Johnson's office.
One of the problems with public property records is that they don't tell you the names. They tell you the locations, building use, and owner names (XYZ LLC?). You'll find a very large office building at 350 5th Avenue in New York, but you won't see that this is the Empire State Building.
So, we have added building names for more than 2 million properties. The names stem from a proprietary database built from more than 100 sources.
In the Enhanced Commercial Property Database, you will see the Empire State Building name, along with names of most other marquee buildings and lots of smaller ones.