In multifamily, data is king.

With an increasingly competitive landscape, decisions are made using accurate and granular data. NER, advertised occupancy, exposure, and concessions–the more specific apartment metrics you can get, the more data you'll have to base pricing decisions on.

The problem is, how do you get specific data? What, aside from spending days online comparing listings, or hours on the phone conducting manual surveys, can you do?

In recent years, many property management groups turned to market survey exchanges. Several cloud-based data analytics tools promised accurate, transparent, and comprehensive overviews of markets across the country. All you had to do was upload your data, and you could see everyone else's.

The prospect of viewing all of your competitors' data at a glance was an enticing one. No more cold calls, no more second-guessing comps, no more fruitless attempts to keep up with data that changed hour by hour, day by day.

But market survey exchanges have their problems. They rely on manual entry, but manual entry involves the risk of data entry errors. Not only does this result in incomplete and outdated data, but using exchanged data can unintentionally lead to private data sharing.

Additionally, market survey exchanges require other companies to opt in. And, crucially, they depend on high user participation for the data to be useful. They only work when everyone shares their numbers.

In the past year, 40% of the largest owners and operators of the NMHC Top 50 have stopped exchanging their market data. They've ceased responding to requests, keeping all of their property and unit insights internal.

If properties in your market disappear, what does that do to your survey data? Your data trends flatline–visibility, accuracy, and market coverage diminish.

The move from survey exchanges is attributed to inaccuracy and concerns of private data usage. Property management groups now require a market survey solution that returns accurate comp data, displaying daily insight from publicly available sources nationwide through automation capabilities.

With broad coverage and ethically sourced data, multifamily companies can pull accurate and compliant insights from thousands of properties across the US, encompassing tens of thousands of units.