Property Research Analyst

Research is the input to every pitch, every valuation and every prospecting list. The work is unglamorous and the standard is exactness, because a wrong owner name or a stale comp travels straight into a client conversation.

• Ownership research. True owner behind an LLC, the contact record, the mailing address, and the last transaction. County records where the database is silent.
• Sale and lease comparables. Pulling comps, filtering for genuine comparability rather than proximity, and noting the conditions that make one an outlier.
• Tenant and rent roll research. Who occupies a building, on what terms where public, and when leases roll.
• Zoning and permit history. Current entitlement, recent permits, and anything filed that signals intent.
• Market statistics. Submarket vacancy, absorption, asking rents, and deliveries, with the period and source stated.
• Prospect list building. Owners matching a profile, deduplicated and enriched, ready for outreach.

Every deliverable carries its sources. See how a placement works.

Research runs on subscriptions the firm already pays for. Most of the skill is knowing which source to trust when two of them disagree.

• Market data. CoStar and LoopNet for comps, tenant data and market statistics.
• Public records. County assessor and recorder portals, which differ by jurisdiction and are where the real work happens when the database is thin.
• CRM. Salesforce or HubSpot, where ownership and contact records land.
• Spreadsheets. Excel or Google Sheets, to a real standard: lookups, pivots, and a source column on every row.
• Marketing platforms. Buildout, where research feeds a pitch or an OM.

Your submarkets and your product type are learned before the first comp request lands.

The failure mode in research is confident wrongness, so screen for how a candidate handles uncertainty and not for how fast they produce a list.

• Source discipline. Ask for a work sample and look for whether each figure is attributed and dated. If it is not, that is the answer.
• Conflict handling. Give them a property where the database and the county record disagree on owner. A strong candidate reports both and says which is more likely and why. A weak one picks one silently.
• Comparability judgment. Show four comps, one of which is a distressed sale. Ask which they would exclude and why.
• Public records fluency. Ask them to walk through finding the owner of a property held in an LLC. Listen for whether they can describe the route through the records.
• Willingness to say the data is not there. The most valuable habit on this role, and the rarest.

Scale Partner weights source discipline most heavily when screening for this role. The FAQ covers the replacement guarantee.

The line between assembling facts and forming an opinion is the whole boundary of this role.

• They do not value a property or produce a broker opinion of value. They assemble the inputs a broker uses to form one.
• They do not build or adjust the underwriting model. They supply the data that goes into it.
• They do not decide which comps are the right comps. They flag the questionable ones and the broker rules.
• They do not contact owners or tenants unless the client has explicitly scoped that.
• They do not interpret zoning code as an entitlement opinion. They report what is filed and of record.

Where AI speeds up extraction from a document or a listing, a person checks the output against the source before it reaches a deliverable. Anything feeding a valuation or an underwriting model is verified line by line, because a misread figure propagates into a decision with capital behind it. That principle is covered in scaling a CRE team with AI.

Research is the work that gets deferred when a team is busy, which is exactly when it is most needed. An analyst dedicated to it means the pitch goes out with current data instead of last quarter's.

The ramp is submarket knowledge, and it is steeper than it looks. An analyst who already knows your product type and your comparable set turns a comp request around in an afternoon. One who does not spends that afternoon on the first three properties.