Real Estate Data Unlocks Niche Investment Opportunities
While the four traditional commercial property types—office, industrial, retail, and multifamily—still dominate real estate investment activity, according to Deloitte, alternative property sectors are gaining in prominence and, on average, yielding greater returns. The alternatives Deloitte referenced achieved on average 11.6% annualized returns compared to 6.2% for core assets between 2012 and 2022.
Specialization can support outperformance. As real estate and real estate operations continue to digitize, exponentially more data becomes available with which to confirm or disprove hunches, surface opportunities in outlying areas, and identify patterns that simply were not visible before.
Below are three niche investment areas made more visible and attainable with insights from Camber Creek portfolio companies.
Small-Bay Industrial
CompStak is the leading platform for commercial real estate data, providing thousands of brokers, investors, and asset managers access to granular lease and sales comps, property details, and market analytics. Their recent report, “Beyond the Big Box: Spotlighting Small-Bay Industrial Trends,” examines the performance of industrial buildings with 150,000 square feet or fewer across nine major markets. These smaller buildings demanded a per-square-foot rent premium ranging from 22% to 60% between 2015 and 2024. This may be in part because of the greater diversity of tenants competing for space in small-bay industrial properties.
Airport Cargo Hubs
CompStak also saw an advantage for airport-adjacent industrial spaces, noting, “There is a rent premium associated with being 5 miles or less distance from major cargo airports ranging from 12–24%.”
Real Estate Requiring Intensive Electricity Usage
As more appliances shift away from fossil fuels for power, electric vehicles proliferate, and artificial intelligence increases energy demand on data centers, electricity becomes an increasingly crucial input for many business operations.
The price of a kilowatt varies greatly with location, energy source, and time of day. Arcadia is the global leader in utility data. The company’s insights into these complicated pricing structures, called tariffs, can help companies situating electric vehicle chargers, data centers, factories, or any business that depends on the flow of electrons—or whose operating costs are sensitive to electricity prices.
Anyone planning the placement of electric vehicle chargers will also want information on foot traffic. Unacast is a leading provider of global location intelligence that delivers cutting-edge analytics about human mobility. Here is an example of Unacast’s platform parsing the relative benefits of three different charger locations.
In real estate, location is still king. But aggregated data about the performance of assets across millions of locations is tremendously valuable and now more accessible than ever.
Photo by Jay Alexander for Unsplash