SPECIAL FOCUS: CAPITAL MARKETS OUTLOOK 2008
APARTMENT FINANCE TODAY • JANUARY 2008
Bright Lights,
Great Data
Entrepreneur illuminates
dealmaking with data.
By Andre Shashaty
New York—The
gaudy lights of
Times Square
don’t make the mood much
brighter this winter for
Robert M. White Jr. and his
many clients among Wall
Street mortgage-backed
securities issuers.
But the 43-year-old president of
Real Capital Analytics takes the long
view, recognizing that the upheavals
the commercial real estate finance and
investment markets experienced in the
second half of 2007 are probably temporary.
Besides, as he sees it, having
good data is the first step toward making
good decisions, no matter which
way the markets are going.
You may have heard pundits say
that commercial real estate has gone
from a largely private, local business to
a global industry that thrives on widely
available performance data on properties,
loans, and investments. Well,
White is one of the key providers of
that information.
He is a dealmaker at heart, but he
left that world to become one of the
founders of Real Capital Analytics in
2000, and is now the majority owner
of the 60-person firm.
White and his colleagues track investment
markets, property sales, mortgage
originations, capital flows, properties
being bought and sold, closings, and
what’s coming to market. They capture
loan information primarily on loans originated
for securitization and data on
property and portfolio investments valued
at $2.5 million or greater.
White said the goal is to capture
data on every such transaction. He
estimates that the firm is now capturing
information on 90 percent of deals
that are valued at $5 million or more.
White grew up in Virginia and
began his career with Eastdil Realty
right out of the University of Virginia.
From there, he helped form Granite
Partners, LLC. After recognizing how
badly handicapped he and fellow dealmakers
were by a lack of reliable information,
White started a research
group at Granite. As the dot-com
boom was in full swing, he started an
Internet operation to provide real
estate deal data.
After the dot-com bust, White did a
little retooling, and today Real Capital
Analytics is a powerhouse that counts
all the major commercial brokerage
firms and many major investors among
its clients. It was scheduled to open its
first overseas office in The Hague in
the Netherlands in January.
Real Capital Analytics serves mostly
large national firms but is trying to
appeal to regional firms, too. The minimum
price for a subscription to the company’s
data is $5,000 per year. The company’s
transactional database contains
information on buyers, sellers, brokers,
terms, and key property attributes.
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