The CRE Comp Data Audit: A 5-Step Check on Where Your Closed Deals Actually Live 

It is Monday morning. A retail landlord just asked you for a valuation on  a 12,000-square-foot space, and the meeting is Thursday. You know you closed something almost identical earlier this year. Same submarket, same tenant type, similar deal terms. It would anchor the whole pitch. 

Then the problem starts. Was that comp in your CoStar export folder? An old Excel file? A PDF your assistant emailed you? On the laptop you replaced last year? You spend forty minutes hunting before you find a version you half-trust, and you still are not sure it is the latest one. 

This is comp data sprawl, and almost every broker has it. Your comp data is one of your most valuable assets, yet most brokers cannot say where all of it lives. Here’s a simple audit to find out. It takes about 30 minutes, it is five questions about your own setup, and by the end you will know exactly how scattered your closed deal data really is. 

What “your comp data” actually means 

Before you audit it, define it. Your comp data is the record of deals you closed or worked, plus everything that makes those records useful later. It is not the market data you buy from a third party. It is the proprietary history you built yourself. 

For most brokers, it breaks into a few types: 

• Closed deal records: the lease or sale, the parties, the price or rent, the date, the space. 
• Sale comps: sale price, cap rate, buyer and seller, and financing on transactions you closed. 
• Lease abstracts: term, options, escalations, concessions, and free rent on deals you handled. 
• BOV and proposal templates: the formatted comp sets you assemble for pitches. 
• The metadata that ties it together: which submarket, which asset class, which client, and which year, so you can find the right comp when you need it. 

The audit below checks five places this data hides. Answer each question honestly about your own setup. Do not fix anything yet. The goal is to see the full picture first. 

Step 1: The platform inventory 

Start with the paid platforms you log into. Open each one and ask: what deal data of mine is sitting in here, and could I get it out cleanly if I left? 

The big three to check are CoStar, CompStak, and LoopNet. 

Here is the part brokers miss. These platforms are built to give you market data, not to hold your private deal history.  

• CoStar collects and resells data across the industry. Data in CoStar is available only to the licensed user, so you can’t share extracts from CoStar with your clients.  
• CompStak runs a crowdsourced exchange: you trade comps to access comps other members shared, and its Teams and Folders features let your group pool and
• organize that shared data.  
• LoopNet shows listings, not your closed deals. 

All three are useful. None of them is a private, owned record of the deals you personally closed that stays only with you. The comps you pull from them are shared market data. Write down what lives in each platform, and note whether it is truly yours or just borrowed from the market. 

Step 2: The spreadsheet inventory 

Now count your spreadsheets. Open Excel, Google Sheets, and any Airtable bases you use, and find every file that holds comp data. 

Most brokers find more than they expect. There is the master comp tracker. There is the version you copied for a specific client. There is the one a colleague started and shared. There is last year’s file you never merged into this year’s. 

Ask yourself three questions for each file. Which one is the real master? When was it last updated? Does anyone else have a copy that has since changed? If you cannot answer all three quickly, that is the sprawl showing itself. 

Step 3: The document inventory 

Next, the loose documents. These are the comps that never made it into a platform or a spreadsheet. They live as files. 

Check each of these: 

• Email attachments: comp PDFs and BOVs you sent or received. 
• Cloud storage: Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive folders. 
• Shared drives: SharePoint or a team server. 
• Your desktop and downloads folder, where comps go to disappear. 
• Your desk drawers: listing sheets and marketing flyers you picked up and stashed in a desk drawer  

Search one cloud folder for the word “comp” and see how many results come back. The number is usually higher than the broker guessed. Each loose file is a comp that is hard to find and easy to lose. 

Step 4: The people inventory 

Comp data sprawls across more than tools. It also sprawls across people. 

List everyone who has touched your comp data. Your assistant or VA. A junior broker on your team. A past partner. The analyst who built a report for you once. Each of these people may hold a copy, a local version, or an export that has drifted out of sync with yours. 

This matters most when someone leaves. When a team member moves firms, whose comps go with them, and whose stay? If you cannot answer that cleanly, your most valuable data is also your least controlled. 

Step 5: The recovery test 

This is the step that makes the problem real. You are going to time yourself. 

Pick one specific comp from about two years ago. A deal you remember closing. Now find the full, accurate record: the terms, the parties, the date, the documents. Start a timer. 

Stop the timer when you have found all the data and created a document you would actually put in front of a client. Write down the time. Write down how many of the five places above you had to open to assemble it. Write down whether you ended up fully confident in the result, or just settled for close enough. 

That number is your real cost. Multiply it by every pitch, every quarter, every year. The recovery test turns a vague feeling into a measured one. 

What to do with what you found 

If the audit was easy and every answer was clear, you are in rare and excellent shape. Keep doing what you are doing. 

Most brokers do not get that result. Most find their comp data spread across several platforms, a stack of spreadsheets, dozens of loose files, and a few people who hold copies. The recovery test took longer than expected. That is the real state of comp data for working brokers, and it carries a cost every time a pitch lands. 

The fix is not another market data subscription. Those platforms give you the market’s data. The gap the audit exposes is different: you have no single private home for the deals you closed yourself, a record you own and control, organized so any comp is one search away. 

That is the problem Compstash was built to solve. It is a private system of record for your own comp data. Your closed deals live in one centralized database that you own and that is never shared with the market or resold.  

You can bulk upload the spreadsheets and files the audit just surfaced, set permission controls so you decide who sees what, and generate branded comp reports in one click when the next pitch lands. The point is simple: your comps are yours. 

If the audit showed you more sprawl than you expected, that is the signal to consolidate. See how Compstash brings your comp data into one place on the features page, or book a demo and walk through your own setup with the team. Run the 30-minute audit first. Then decide what your scattered comp data is really costing you.