Competitive Building Sets - How to make them and how to use them?
I've been spending time thinking about how to approach the creation of a competitive set against a subject property. Mostly from the perspective of being an entrepreneurial owner and wanting to better understand where my buildings sit against similar ones in my area competing for the same tenants. I have access to reonomy, CoStar, CommercialEdge and CompStak data. 

I've tried googling and the best I can really find is an article on creating comp sets for hotels. 

Does anyone mind sharing some of their process for putting together and actually using a competitive sets?
[{"id": "gz9scup", "text": "Multifamily is pretty straightforward. Drive the neighborhood (or Google Maps if you\u2019re an out of towner) and find nearby buildings of similar type (low/mid/high rise, similar walkability, etc).\n\nGo home, look them up on Google and find the ones that were built at a similar time or at least appear to have been if you can\u2019t find the year built. Then find the ones with similar finishes to get a final list.\n\nThen from there check sites like Apartments.com and the buildings\u2019 own websites if they have one to get rental pricing.\n\nNow if you\u2019re talking specifically commercial like retail and office it\u2019s much harder. CoStar is my firms go to for commercial. We also have a strong leasing team who are well connected to other landlords so they can call around to get a feel for the market that way.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "gza5szn", "text": "Would agree that it's very much dependent on asset type, but generally you can go about it this way if you're using CoStar:\n\n\\- Narrow down your submarket/neighborhood. Unless you're looking for a comp set for a rarely-seen property type, you don't want to compare your property to something across town. Decide what the boundaries for your search on. CoStar has a radius feature that could be helpful for this.\n\n\\- Use filters to start finding properties that have similar qualities. For example, I usually start by eliminating properties that are too different in age or size from mine. For multifamily, for example, you don't want to compare a high rise to your low rise. For industrial, you don't want to compare a 1M SF distribution center to your 50k warehouse. For retail, you don't want to compare a new grocery-anchored shopping center to a 40 year old strip center.\n\n\\- The above step should ideally get you to under a dozen properties. At this step, I look through the list and start asking myself, if the tenant or guest at my property were looking to leave my property, what buildings would they be looking at? With office, for example, you can look through pictures to see who else on the market is offering similar spaces, amenities, locational advantages, etc. \n\nOnce you've got your list narrowed down to 5 or 6 properties, you've basically got a comp set. You can track their physical and economic qualities over time in an Excel and see how they're performing relative to yours. For example, for office, if you see that some offices are starting to upgrade their amenities or changing their rental rates, it might be a hint that you need to do the same to be competitive.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "gza5x13", "text": "Ask your building owner who he considers the competition to be. Then ask the competition who he considers the competition to be. If they match, you got a set. \n\nMost often c class owners think they have b class buildings and can get a class tenants. \n\nIf you have an appraisal buddy, ask him. The appraisal institute has whole books dedicated to figuring out a competitive set and matching comps against it. \n\nIf you don\u2019t have an appraisal buddy, best find one before you actually need one.\n\nAnd pull a market underwriting report in costar. They do this for you.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "gzg22d2", "text": "I use Costar for most property types. There are features to build competitive sets in Costar. You mentioned hotels which is a weak point for Costar. STR provides the best revenue (ADR) and occupancy for hotels. The appraisals you get when you get a loan for a building also will give you an idea of the comps for the property.\nAnother option is talk to a broker about giving you a competitive set as part of a proposal to be the leasing broker for your building. Some brokers' offering memorandums for property sales are pretty good at also providing competitive sets. Note that a broker competitive set is trying to push up value for a sale, but an appraisal competitive set tends to be more formal in making value adjustments for differences in a property.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]