Client Testimonial: Jiro Yoshida, Penn State

Meet Jiro Yoshida, the Pasquarella Professor of Business at the Pennsylvania State University. See how Professor Yoshia uses CompStak daily in his studies.

Check out the full Client Testimonial on YouTube:

Before working with CompStak’s data, my biggest problem was simply there was no commercial lease information available to researchers. I met Michael Mandel, Co-Founder of CompStak, and I got really excited. I immediately arranged a purchase agreement between Penn State and CompStak and I’ve been an enthusiastic user since then.

Jiro Yoshida

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Transcript:

I’m Jiro Yoshida, the Pasquarella Professor of Business at Pennsylvania State University.

Before working with CompStak’s data, my biggest problem was simply there was no commercial lease information available to researchers. There are good databases for mortgages, housing transactions, and listings.

But commercial lease information was held by major brokers. So in 2019, I met Michael Mandel, Co-Founder of CompStak, and I got really excited. So I immediately arranged the purchase agreement between Penn State and CompStak and I’ve been an enthusiastic user since then.

CompStak’s data integrates many important and interesting aspects of commercial real estate. It integrates property information, lease details, owner information, tenant information, and broker information. And the web interface is beautiful and very easy to use.

So I’m currently working on a project titled “Expectations and Risk Premiums in Illiquid Real Assets.” It’s a joint work with our PhD student, Masashi Takahashi.

We produce the spot rent index. This represents the rental prices for instantaneous and immediate use of commercial spaces. So we cover 12 office markets and nine industrial markets.

Lease rate can be reduced at the beginning by free rent, but subsequent rents can be escalated by the contract. CompStak’s rich data allows us to remove the effect of lease term and also other characteristics.

Commercial real estate is is understudied due to limited data availability. But it represents about one third of the national wealth or domestic net worth. So more studies are needed in this area. So CompStak’s database is really, really useful for researchers.