A big announcement comes out today about a new partnership between commercial real estate data aggregator CompStak and digital connectivity certification organization WiredScore that will now display the Wired Certification for any building that has one. This isn’t a complete surprise. WiredScore co-founder Arie Barendrecht told me of his intentions to get his score into popular data platforms during a recent conversation about their appointment of VTS’s Brandon Weber to his company’s board. “We want people to find WiredScore buildings on every platform where people search for office space,” he said.
Now it looks like the first one step of this strategy has been unveiled. While this means a lot for both companies it also says a lot about the future of the real estate industry. If these types of metrics start getting used as factors for acquisition or lease decisions, it could cause buildings with a higher score to have a higher market value. This would spur further investment into digital communications for buildings around the country. When I asked Arie about why he thinks that the score that his company gives has started to become such an important building measurement he told me, “Optimizing employee experience is the most critical consideration for companies looking for office space, and connectivity is the foundation for everything employees do in the workspace. As a result, the quality of a building’s connectivity is massively important information. Amazon proved this by making connectivity a high-priority line item in their HQ2 search.”
Michael Mandel, co-founder of CompStak, said that this many of his users had requested this integration so he knew that there was going to be a lot of benefit to his platform from bringing this data in, “From CompStak’s perspective, we have found that the more data we add on the properties and transactions we cover, the greater the demand becomes for our platforms. In the case of WiredScore, many of our clients requested this integration, so we are excited to introduce this new feature, which we know will add value to their workflows.
Many of you might remember that CompStak was invested in and partnered with credit rating and investor service company Moody’s. Mandel pointed out that this integration is “unrelated to the work we are doing with Moody’s.” Still, Moody’s interest on factoring in commercial real estate data into its credit assessment is an important reminder of how much information isn’t known about the world’s biggest asset class.
My guess is that this is not the first announcement that I will be getting from either of these companies. WiredScore is likely looking for other data companies willing to display their data and CompStak is probably thinking hard about what other types of certifications would be beneficial for their user base. Either way, these types of partnerships are chipping away at the fog of the unknown that has hovered over the commercial real estate industry since its beginning.
