RealPoint: Data Powerhouse for the CMBS Community

Information Tour de Force... Last week Jim Titus, SVP, and Rob Dobilas, Group Vice President, toured me around RealPoint, a new service for the CMBS (Collateralized Mortgage Backed Securities) and commercial mortgage community from GMAC's Institutional Advisors.    Wow. ... RealPoint is a subscription service for professionals in the CMBS and commercial mortgage professionals active in the secondary market.  Content is a combination of public documents, third party information services and original research done by a team of twenty-five analysts. 

You begin to use RealPoint by creating your own portfolio of CMBS offerings.  RealPoint tracks about 440 deals, which represent 90-95% of all offerings since 1991.  Normally, each offering represents a pool of commercial mortgages secured by multiple property types located in multiple states.  Once you've created a portfolio, you can slice and dice the data in an extraordinary number of ways.  What property types are represented?  What's your exposure to specific tenants?  Are there any problems with monthly payments?  Where is each property located?  Want to see a picture?  Would you like to see the original prospectus?  How about the Pooling and Service Agreement?  Which firms originated your loans?  Well, you get the picture.  Any scrap of information relating to the loan or the underlying collateral is accessible.    

Even though RealPoint is aimed at a relatively narrow slice of the real estate world, there are two lessons for other web services.  First, RealPoint has tightly integrated information from multiple vendors.  For example, you'll find Commercial Real Estate Direct, Reis, and Torto Wheaton Research skillfully wound into RealPoint's reporting.  Second, RealPoint's analysts are available to subscribers for consultation and feedback on specific questions.  So a high-tech web interface is combined with a high-touch human voice.   Very nice.

Clarification... All LoopNet information accessible through the RealEstateJournal.com is NOT necessarily a month old.  That's because listings posted to LoopNet by a Premium Member (currently there are about 5,500) are immediately available to all RealEstateJournal visitors. 

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com