By Chase McAteer, SIOR, and Ryan Hartsell, SIOR
Commercial real estate comps drive better business decisions. They anchor negotiations in evidence rather than assumptions. Reliable comps help tenants and buyers understand fair market terms while giving advisors a clearer basis for pricing and concessions.
Texas is a non-disclosure state. Consequently, comps are more challenging to find and more complicated to validate. Deal terms do not post publicly by default. Many parties involved in a transaction also have strong incentives to keep details private. That makes reliable comps a competitive advantage for teams that build systems to capture, qualify, and share them.
This article explains how verified comps create negotiation leverage, why comps are difficult in Texas, where quality comps come from, what makes lease and sale comps challenging to source, and how we keep our internal comps database current.
How comps create leverage and close deals
The end goal of comps is not data collection but decision clarity and negotiation leverage.
Establishing fair market and aiming above
Comps help confirm where the market sits. They provide a baseline for fair market terms. From there, the target shifts to better than fair market terms.
The value is simple. Verified comps reduce subjective arguments. A party can argue over differences in tenant strength, timing, or concessions, but a comp in the same building or next door provides strong grounding. It defines the current market environment more clearly than asking rates or opinions.
Educating decision-makers on both sides
Verified comps also function as education.
Sometimes the tenant side needs to educate internal decision-makers. Leadership may not know current market terms or current concession packages. Comps provide credibility in internal approvals.
Other times, the landlord’s side needs education. A landlord or landlord representative may be less familiar with where the market has moved. Verified comps show what competitors are doing in the same submarket and even on the same street. This helps conversations shift from posture to reality.
Enabling the landlord representative to deliver hard news
A recurring negotiation dynamic exists in landlord representation. Landlord representatives answer to the owner who pays them. Some feel constrained from pushing back too strongly on an owner’s expectations. Verified comps give them support.
When the comps are clear, the landlord representative can forward them to the owner and make the case with less personal risk. The comp becomes the messenger. That often accelerates movement toward terms that match the market and closes deals that might otherwise stall.
Winning business through proof of skill
Comps also support business development. A strong comp library demonstrates negotiation experience and market awareness. It shows prospects what deal terms look like when a tenant representative brings verified intel to the table.
Why Texas makes comps hard to find
Texas presents a structural challenge for owners and brokers trying to understand actual market terms.
First, Texas is a non-disclosure state. Parties are not required to post lease terms or sale terms in a way the market can easily access. The default posture in many deals is privacy.
Second, most actors involved in the process have reasons to keep deal details from becoming public.
Agents often avoid sharing specific terms because disclosure can compromise confidentiality. It can also invite competitors to chase lease expirations. When expiration timelines circulate, competitors gain a roadmap for prospecting.
Businesses also prefer privacy. Deal terms can carry internal implications. Some companies do not want other parties drawing conclusions about their costs, timing, growth plans, or lease structure. Tax implications also drive a preference to keep information close.
Landlords have similar incentives. If a landlord gives one tenant substantial concessions, the landlord often prefers that other tenants in the building do not learn those details before their own negotiations. In buildings with multiple tenants, one disclosed deal can reset expectations for everyone else.
Third, documents themselves often reinforce confidentiality. Non-disclosure language appears in commission agreements and proposals. Lease documents also limit what parties share. Even when some information circulates informally, the written agreements set constraints that reduce transparency.
Why comps still circulate
Despite confidentiality pressure, comps still move through the market. People share what they know. Some parties share details even when documents discourage it. The practical reality is that information moves, and tends to move through relationships and trust.
A second reality matters as well. People who prefer confidentiality still need market context to make decisions. Landlord representatives, tenant representatives, and owners still need to understand competitive terms to close deals. This creates a market where comps exist, but access depends on systems, platforms, and relationships.
Where quality comps come from
Reliable comps do not come from a single source. A strong process consolidates multiple channels into a single usable view.
Internal transactions and a structured capture process
One of the most dependable sources of comps comes from internal deal flow. A firm that completes a high volume of transactions generates first-hand market data.
The key is capturing it consistently. A simple system is to require a deal sheet for any transaction invoiced the prior week, then review those deals as a team. This keeps the group current on shifting conditions and forces consistent documentation of the key terms. It also prevents comp loss due to memory or turnover.
Once documented, those deal sheets feed the internal comp database. This becomes the backbone dataset because it reflects executed deals, not marketing numbers.
Comp exchange platforms and appraisal-oriented sources
Third-party platforms expand coverage beyond internal transactions.
- CompStak functions as a prominent lease and sales comps platform. Users contribute comps and receive comps in return. It works well when you participate consistently and when you take time to qualify what you receive.
- Enriched Data is another resource. It is less widely known in brokerage circles and aligns more closely with appraisal workflows. It contains applicable sales and lease comps that fill gaps in brokerage reporting.
- Trepp adds another angle. It tracks commercial mortgage-backed securities properties. CMBS tracking often comes with appraisal valuations and sales comp information tied to those assets. Trepp takes time to evaluate and validate, but it opens a channel for intel on securitized properties.
Each of these sources provides pieces. None offers a complete view alone. The value comes from consolidating and qualifying.
Relationship-driven swaps with landlord representatives
A practical comp strategy involves reciprocal exchange.
When one party provides a comp to a landlord representative, it often results in multiple comps coming back. This works because landlord representatives want to understand what competitive buildings are doing. They want real terms, not asking rates.
These swaps tend to work best when the comps are relevant. Same submarket. Similar size. Similar building class. Similar deal context. When the comp helps someone make a better argument internally, they respond in kind.
Tenant representative peer networks
Another channel is a peer group of tenant representatives who share information. These are relationship-based exchanges that require high trust. They tend to produce better detail than broad platforms because the parties understand what matters in a comp.
REN.co for deal visibility and follow-up
A newer workflow involves monitoring published deal announcements and then using relationships to fill in the missing terms.
- REN.co functions as an intent platform that scrapes the internet.
- A category called “deal brokered” captures when a transaction is published and sends notifications.
- These notifications often lack deal terms, but they still provide valuable inputs: the tenant name, the building, and the brokers or agents involved.
Those inputs allow targeted follow-up. If you know the parties, you can call for context and gather comp insight off the record. Even without full terms, the signal of who moved where and with whom becomes a valuable map of market activity.
Lease comps vs sale comps: why the details matter
Many people ask which type of comp is harder: lease comps or sale comps? Let’s explore:
Lease comps: easier to frame, harder to qualify fully
Lease comps often appear black-and-white on the surface. You can often identify the tenant, the rent, the lease term, and a few concessions. Even then, the quality of the comp depends on the details behind the headline.
Lease comps hinge on factors such as:
- Tenant quality and strength
- Where the landlord sits in their lender cycle for the building loan, if a loan exists
- The landlord’s position in their ownership cycle, including investment criteria and objectives
- The tenant’s objectives and constraints, which drive what they push for and accept
- The structure of concessions, including:
- Rent abatement structure
- Tenant improvement allowance structure
- Who performs which parts of the work
- Timing of payments and reimbursements
- How conditions and milestones affect funding
A lease comp shared as three bullet points rarely tells the whole story. Without the mechanics, a comp can mislead.
Time also matters. A comp in the same building from six months ago can reflect a different landlord reality. Changes in leasing velocity, occupancy, lender pressure, or portfolio objectives can change what a landlord will accept.
Sale comps: a deeper diligence problem
Sale comps introduce more variables. The headline price rarely tells you what you need to know.
Key variables include:
- Building age
- Deficiencies in major MEPs
- Land size
- Condition and functional obsolescence
- Industrial-specific issues such as:
- How much land is stabilized versus raw
- Rail access
- Utilities and infrastructure availability
- Whether infrastructure needs upgrades based on the buyer’s use
These factors drive value. They also explain why two assets that look similar in a spreadsheet trade at different pricing. Without these details, sales comps can lead to unsupported conclusions.
How an internal comps database stays useful
Even strong comps lose value if they can’t be shared quickly and clearly (accessibility matters). If clients and advisors do not have an easy way to view comps in context, the data becomes less actionable.
A typical evolution starts with a shared spreadsheet.
- A shared Google Sheet works because it is fast, accessible, and easy to distribute.
- A virtual assistant can help maintain consistency by consolidating internal comp capture with comps sourced externally.
- Teams can download it, edit it, and email it to clients or other agents.
As volume grows, spreadsheets hit limits. Sorting and filtering become harder. Presentation becomes harder. Linking comps to maps, property photos, and standardized reports becomes harder.
A more scalable approach integrates comps into a platform used in day-to-day work.
- ScoutSpace functions as an online property survey platform.
- It includes a comps database where comps are loaded and organized.
- Users can search by property type and other factors entered with the comp.
- It generates clean online reports and PDFs.
- It supports mapping, location context, and quick visuals.
- It supports street-view-style context, which matters in industrial settings where property variation is wide, including differences between distribution and manufacturing.
The goal stays the same across tool: Capture comps consistently, qualify them carefully, and share them quickly in a format clients can use.
Securing the best outcomes
If you are negotiating a lease or evaluating an acquisition in Texas, comps matter more than ever. The market has real terms, but those terms do not surface easily in a non-disclosure state. Better outcomes come from verified comps, strong qualification, and a system that turns information into leverage.
Oxford Partners provides tenant and occupier representation, with a comp process built from internal deal flow, trusted platforms like CompStak, appraisal-oriented data such as Enriched Data, CMBS-linked resources like Trepp, and relationship-based exchanges supported by monitoring tools like REN.co.
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