Eastdil Secured (Real Estate Investment Banking)
Eastdil Secured is one of the oldest real estate investment banks in the industry. My business partner and I started working with them early after we got Beitz and Daigh Geographics started. Considered a pioneer in the industry, Eastdil Secured has participated in every real estate cycle since 1967, attaining over 40 years of real estate investment banking experience. For an example of the impact that they have on the real estate market—over the past 12 months (in 2014) Eastdil Secured has completed over 725 transactions totaling $244 billion. While they include Office, Hospitality, Multifamily, Industrial, Land, and Retail as product types, it is Retail where they have really been using location analytics.
Retail Shopping Centers have an inherent calculated value based on the leases they carry and the value of the buildings and the land. Leases with long terms and national strong credit tenants are very desirable to investors looking to buy shopping centers. So, a shopping center can look great on paper when you look at it today, but what about the center’s long-term ability to generate lease renewals and new leases? And how do you communicate a shopping center’s location assets that are outside of some pro-forma?
Often when a shopping center is put on the market for sale, an Offering Memorandum book is created that details all the information about the shopping center. The typical items included in these offering memorandums are site plans, rent rolls, and financial statements. For certain shopping centers, Eastdil Secured uses location analytics to take this a step further and explore the location attributes that help drive sales at a shopping centers. Location analytics helps Eastdil Secured to visualize this data through various maps exhibits such as:
- The shopping center’s trade area boundaries with statistics on population makeup.
- The locations of the surrounding retail clusters and competition.
- Heat maps showing where the population is increasing or decreasing near the shopping center.
- Aerials showing the clusters of “high spending” households *households with over $100,000 household income per year.
- Anchor tenant demographics compared to the same anchor tenant in nearby markets.
Having the ability to create these visuals provides an extra layer of insight and understanding to would-be shopping center buyers. Location analytics data on shopping centers provides more information to help owners and brokers to craft a data informed story on these properties. This is not only helpful for the short-term sale but also extends onto the leasing and redevelopment process. Materials from the offering memorandum can be morphed into marketing materials that show potential retailers why this property works for them. Retailers love nuggets of good market data because this makes their lives easier when trying to better understand a property.