Client Testimonial: Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Columbia Business School

Meet Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. See how Professor Van Nieuwerburgh uses CompStak daily in his studies.

Check out the full Client Testimonial on YouTube:

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. I’m the Earle Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School in New York City. At Columbia, I am also the co-director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate. at Columbia Business School.

Before working with CompStak data, when studying the office market in the wake of the pandemic, my biggest obstacle was finding data on rents for offices. And CompStak had just the right thing for my research, which is detailed lease-level information on office rents, lease contracts, lease terms, the tenants of these rents, the landlords, where the buildings were located, what the net effect of rent was on these buildings. And that really allowed me to study the dynamics of rents in office markets all around the country. with a focus on New York City and how these evolved during and after the pandemic.

One of the interesting and surprising findings in our research is that there was a real bifurcation happening in the office market where some of the lower quality office properties, Class B and Class C properties, had rent dynamics that diverged from those of the higher quality or trophy Class A plus office buildings and we were really able to leverage CompStacks data to group these different types of buildings into these two categories and distill these different trends for the haves and the have-nots in the office market.

I can strongly recommend CompStak data to other researchers. First of all, It’s very granular data. There’s many, many, many observations on different leases and there’s a lot of information available for each of these leases. The data is also quite comprehensive. I have studied it and benchmarked it against other data sets and its coverage is national. It covers not only the largest markets, pretty much every large metropolitan area as well as office markets, retail, and industrial real estate markets.

So, overall a phenomenal data source and also the folks at CompStak are happy to support academic research and I found them easy to communicate with and supportive of my work.