There is no single source of truth for commercial real estate transaction data. The three platforms that come up most often in regional brokerage conversations — CoStar, RCA (now operating as MSCI Real Assets following Real Capital Analytics' acquisition), and CompStak — each built their data sets through different collection methodologies, cover different transaction types with different depth, and serve different primary use cases. Understanding those differences matters when you're deciding which platforms to subscribe to, how to weight data from each source, and where the analytical blind spots are in your current workflow.
This isn't a ranking. These platforms are not in direct competition across every use case. The right answer for a regional brokerage depends on your deal mix, your target submarkets, and what you're trying to do analytically.
CoStar Group: The infrastructure layer
CoStar is the closest thing CRE has to a universal data substrate. The platform's coverage spans all property types — office, industrial, retail, multifamily, hotel — across virtually every US market. For most regional brokerages, CoStar is the starting point for comp research, submarket vacancy reporting, property-level data, and asking rent benchmarks.
CoStar's data collection methodology combines direct entry from owners and brokers, public records, and a field research team that physically inspects properties in major markets. The result is the broadest coverage in the industry, particularly for building-level data like RBA (Rentable Building Area), GLA, building class, year built, vacancy, and asking rents.
Where CoStar shows limitations is in executed transaction data — specifically, deal-level attributes that landlords and tenants prefer not to disclose. TI allowances, free rent periods, contract rent versus asking rent, and full concession packages are inconsistently reported in CoStar because the platform depends on voluntary disclosure of those terms. A CoStar comp pull for a Dallas office submarket will show you what's in the record; it may not capture the full economics of the deal.
For regional brokerages working primarily in leasing markets, CoStar is a required subscription. The API access tier unlocks programmatic data pulls for brokerages building more structured analytical workflows, which changes how the data can be used downstream.
MSCI Real Assets (formerly Real Capital Analytics): Investment sales depth
RCA — now part of MSCI Real Assets — built its data set around investment sales transactions. The platform tracks acquisition, disposition, and financing events for commercial properties with a focus on institutional-grade assets. Coverage includes transaction price, buyer and seller identity (to the extent publicly disclosable), cap rates where derivable, and deal structure information.
For regional brokerages that work investment sales or have principals who need to track institutional capital flows through their market, RCA/MSCI is genuinely differentiated. If you need to know which institutional buyers have been active in DFW industrial over the last 18 months, what cap rate compression looked like in Dallas CBD office, or how private capital flows compare to institutional capital in Sun Belt retail acquisitions, RCA's data set is deeper and more current than anything CoStar offers in the investment sales segment.
For a regional brokerage that works primarily in leasing rather than investment sales, RCA's value proposition is more limited. The platform is not designed to support lease comp analysis — it doesn't track lease transaction terms, and its property-level data is less granular than CoStar for the dimensions that matter in leasing: asking rent PSF, vacancy by floor, tenant mix, lease commencement dates. A leasing-focused brokerage may find RCA/MSCI useful as a market intelligence tool for understanding capital flows in their target submarkets, without needing it as a daily comp source.
CompStak: Crowdsourced lease comp accuracy
CompStak operates on a fundamentally different model. Rather than building a proprietary research team or relying on public records, CompStak crowdsources lease transaction data directly from the brokers who closed the deals. Brokers contribute lease comp information — including deal terms that often don't appear in public records — in exchange for CompStak credits that allow them to access comps contributed by other brokers.
The result is a lease comp data set that, in dense urban markets and major Sun Belt metros including Dallas–Fort Worth, captures concession package details at higher completeness rates than CoStar. TI allowances, free rent periods, and effective rent calculations are more consistently populated in CompStak comps because the contributing broker had firsthand knowledge of those terms.
The limitation is coverage breadth. CompStak's depth is uneven — strong in markets where a critical mass of brokers participate in the exchange, thinner in suburban submarkets and smaller cities where broker participation is lower. In DFW, CompStak's coverage of major office submarkets like Uptown and Legacy West is reasonably strong, but a broker working Las Colinas or Frisco will find fewer comps available on some deal types. CompStak also doesn't cover investment sales in any meaningful depth — it's purpose-built for lease comps.
The most analytically useful use case for CompStak at a regional brokerage is as a complement to CoStar, not a replacement. Pull the comp pool from CoStar for coverage breadth, then cross-reference CompStak for concession package data on the transactions where CoStar's record is incomplete. The combination is more accurate than either source alone.
Where each source fits in a regional brokerage workflow
For a regional CRE brokerage working primarily in leasing in one or two metro markets, the practical framework looks like this.
CoStar is the foundation. Every comp pull starts here. The platform's property-level data, submarket boundaries, vacancy reporting, and asking rent benchmarks are the baseline. API access is worth evaluating if your firm is building structured comp workflows rather than relying on manual exports.
CompStak fills concession data gaps. For any deal where the economics of concession packages matter — which is most Class A office leasing in the current DFW market — cross-referencing CompStak against your CoStar comps adds analytical precision. The subscription cost needs to be weighed against the benefit, and for brokerages with lower leasing volume, the ROI calculation is tighter.
RCA/MSCI Real Assets is relevant if your brokerage does investment sales or if your Managing Broker uses capital flow data to inform leasing strategy — understanding where institutional buyers are active helps anticipate which landlords are focused on occupancy versus yield-driven management. For leasing-only regional firms, it's not a required subscription.
The integration problem the market hasn't solved
The honest answer that most data platform comparisons skip: even if a regional brokerage subscribes to all three platforms, the workflow problem remains. Data lives in three separate systems with three separate interfaces, three separate export formats, and no common transaction identifier that links a CoStar record to its RCA record to its CompStak contribution. A broker doing a comprehensive comp analysis manually reconciles data from whichever sources they have access to — and that reconciliation step is where quality and time get lost.
This is a structural problem in the CRE data market. CoStar in particular has been cautious about data portability given their data collection investment. The implication for regional brokerages is that having the right subscriptions is necessary but not sufficient — the workflow layer on top of the data sources is where the analytical leverage actually comes from.
We're not saying that multi-source data subscriptions are a mistake. They're genuinely additive when the analytical work supports it. What we're saying is that the decision about which platforms to use should include a clear-eyed view of the workflow you'll need to make those data sources usable in daily brokerage operations.
If you'd like to talk through how your current data sources map to your comp workflow and where the gaps are, request a demo and we can walk through it against your active submarket and deal mix.
