Rethinking Rent: New Tool (CCRI) from Columbia Business School and CompStak Will Reshape Market Insights

Rethinking Rent: New Tool from Columbia Business School and CompStak Will Reshape Market Insights

Columbia Business School and CompStak launch first-of-its-kind tool to deeply analyze office, retail, and industrial rent trends

New York City – Columbia Business School and CompStak today announced a new partnership to launch and maintain the Columbia CompStak Rent Index (CCRI for short), a first-of-its-kind rent analytic tool that will offer new insights into commercial rental markets in more than 50 cities across the United States. The new index is a collaboration combining the real estate economics expertise of the Columbia Business School’s Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate and CompStak’s unique crowdsourcing methodology to gather granular, difficult-to-find, commercial real estate market information. The index will be updated monthly at the national level and quarterly for individual markets. 

The new CCRI compares similar spaces in similar locations over time, and uses the net effective rent – what the tenant actually pays, after spreading concessions (free rent months and tenant improvements) over the life of the lease. It draws rent, lease size and term, concessions, building characteristics, and precise location from over one million detailed leases signed since 2010 across office, retail, and industrial properties in about 130 U.S. metropolitan areas. The index controls for the stable features of the building and location, and uses the remaining variation to show rent growth or decline over time. This new index has the potential to replace “rent averages,” a traditional metric within rental markets that often misses important nuances such as move-in incentives and changes in the types of buildings or tenants over time. 

“This model provides a more complete picture of the commercial real-estate market,” said Columbia Business School Professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate and Co-Director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate. “Without this data, mayors and business leaders may make decisions based on market averages, which provide an incomplete picture of the market.” 

“This partnership reflects a shared commitment to transparency and rigor in commercial real estate data,” said Michael Mandel, Co-Founder and CEO at CompStak. “The CCRI gives investors, lenders, and researchers a credible, academically grounded reference point they can rely on.”

The index will be updated monthly at the national level and quarterly for individual markets. Early insights from the index are promising, including in new research from Columbia Business School professors Tomasz Piskorski, Boaz Abramson, and Van Nieuwerburgh, which shows that the quality-adjusted rent index is more accurate than traditional methods. Location-specific insights include:

• In Manhattan, average starting rents in the office market have gradually moved up, which could lead to the presumption that office markets have been recovering nicely for the past several years. However, data from the CCRI shows that quality‑adjusted office rents, by mid‑2025, had only just clawed back to where they started before the COVID-19 pandemic. The divergence arises from the much stronger rent performance of the highest quality properties in Hudson Yards and Park Avenue submarkets.

• In Dallas, a few large high-profile office leases in new buildings similarly distorted the average rent numbers. 

“In an opaque and ever-changing market,” said Columbia Business School Professor Tomasz Piskorski, the Edward S. Gordon Professor of Real Estate, “this index applies a single method across office, retail, and industrial property types, enabling reliable comparisons across markets both now and over many years.” 

About Columbia Business School
Columbia Business School is the only world-class, Ivy League business school that delivers a learning experience where academic excellence meets with real-time exposure to the pulse of global business. The thought leadership of the School’s faculty and staff members, combined with the accomplishments of its distinguished alumni and position in the center of global business, means that the School’s efforts have an immediate, measurable impact on the forces shaping business every day. To learn more about Columbia Business School’s position at the very center of business, please visit business.columbia.edu.

About CompStak

CompStak is the leading source of commercial real estate lease comps, sale comps, property data, and analytics. Our crowdsourced data platform provides unparalleled transparency into commercial real estate markets, allowing lenders, owners, investors, brokers, and appraisers to make better decisions. 

Through CompStak AI, an integrated suite of AI-powered tools, we are redefining how real estate professionals discover insights, analyze markets, and make data-driven decisions. CompStak AI extends the power of our verified transaction data, enabling investors, lenders, and asset managers to surface insights faster, understand market dynamics at a glance, and make more confident, data-driven decisions. By combining human-verified data with intelligent AI, CompStak delivers a clearer, more actionable view of the market.To learn more about CompStak, visit compstak.com.

Media Contacts: 

Columbia Business School: Keshia Mark, klm74@gsb.columbia.edu

CompStak: Brigette Palombo, ccri@compstak.com