CompStak

CompStak is a New York-based commercial real estate data company founded in 2011 that built its business on crowdsourcing the industry's most closely held information: the terms of commercial lease and sales transactions, known as comparables or comps. Brokers, appraisers and researchers contribute the deal data they hold and earn credits to obtain data contributed by others, creating an exchange that CompStak verifies and supplements with analytics sold to institutional clients. Listed in this directory with New York, New York, as its location and compstak.com as its official website, the company serves banks, private equity firms, owners, operators and brokerage firms.

Lease terms are the raw material of commercial property valuation, yet unlike residential sales they are not public record in most of the United States. CompStak's insight was that the professionals who collectively possessed this information would share it if the exchange was fair, verified and easier than the informal system it replaced. Its market reports on office, retail and industrial rents, built from that contributed data, are cited in real estate and business news.

Founding and Origins

CompStak was co-founded by Michael Mandel, a former New York City commercial real estate broker, together with Vadim Belobrovka, who served as chief technology officer. Mandel had experienced the industry's data problem from inside. Brokers exchanged lease information through informal, often chaotic Monday morning meetings, a process that was time-consuming, imprecise and dependent on individual networks; the deals discussed were frequently irrelevant to the brokers listening, while the information they actually needed remained locked in colleagues' files at other firms.

His conclusion was that the offline process should simply be moved online: if brokers across the industry placed their deal information in one searchable database, each could find what they needed when they needed it. CompStak began as a spreadsheet and prototype in 2011 and launched in 2012, after a difficult early fundraising period in which investors questioned whether real estate was a large enough market. Domain expertise proved decisive in persuading both investors and the brokers whose data the platform needed.

The Exchange Model

The company's first product, CompStak Exchange, is a marketplace for lease and sales deal information built on a credit system. Members who are commercial real estate brokers, fee appraisers and research staff at brokerage firms submit comps, detailed records of transactions, and earn credits for sharing, with credits functioning as a virtual currency that can be spent on obtaining other data. Contributors are rewarded according to the accuracy and uniqueness of what they supply, aligning individual incentives with data quality.

Every comp passes through community sourcing, machine learning checks and analyst verification before it reaches users, a process the company presents as its data standard. The model expanded over time: originally limited to lease comps, it grew in 2017 to include sales comps and broader property data, reflecting the same information problem on the investment sales side of the business.

Products and Analytics

Beyond the Exchange, CompStak sells enterprise data and analytics to institutional customers who need the information in bulk or integrated into their own underwriting. Its platform allows users to search, compare and analyse leasing and property information in real time, supporting tasks such as valuing a building, benchmarking a tenant's rent against the market, assessing a submarket and underwriting acquisitions or loans.

The company also publishes market research drawn from its database, including analyses of rents and leasing activity in major markets and commentary on contested questions such as the future of office demand, on which Mandel publicly took a bullish view of return to office during a period when much of the market was declaring the office finished. These reports give CompStak a voice in industry news disproportionate to its size.

Growth and Funding

CompStak expanded market by market across the United States. Within three years of founding it had gathered hundreds of thousands of comps and covered fifteen markets, including New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, San Diego, greater Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Sacramento and New Jersey, with Denver among the additions. Each new market required seeding the exchange with enough local data to make membership worthwhile, the classic challenge of a data network business.

Investors funded that expansion through successive rounds. The company had raised about 28 million dollars by the time of a 12 million dollar round led by IA Capital in 2019, and it later closed a 50 million dollar Series C, bringing cumulative funding to roughly 89 million dollars. Moody's Analytics became a minority investor, and CompStak's data was among the services offered through the real estate data portal Moody's built around its Reis Network, an indication of the company's standing with institutional consumers of property data.

Geographic Scope

CompStak's coverage is the United States commercial property market, concentrated in the major metropolitan markets where leasing volume justifies a dedicated exchange. Its headquarters is in New York City, the largest and most competitive office market in the country and the market whose data problem inspired the company. In recent descriptions the company operates with a team of around 130 employees distributed across five cities.

The crowdsourced model ties coverage depth to professional participation: markets are strongest where brokers and appraisers actively contribute, which is why expansion proceeded city by city rather than through a single national launch.

Clients and Users

CompStak's users fall into two connected groups. The Exchange membership consists of the brokers, appraisers and researchers who both supply and consume comps in the course of their daily work. At one stage the company raised its ambition for that platform from 20,000 to 150,000 users. The Enterprise customer base consists of the institutions that buy verified data and analytics at scale: banks, private equity firms, owner-operators and brokerage firms are the categories the company itself highlights, joined by government entities that use its data.

For these clients, the value is transactional accuracy. A rent figure that is wrong by a small amount per square foot can misprice a large building by millions of dollars, so verified, transaction-level data commands a premium over estimates and asking prices.

Digital Presence

The company's digital presence is centred on compstak.com, which hosts the platform, explains its data standard and publishes research, market commentary and company news. CompStak's leadership participates actively in the property technology conversation through podcasts, conferences and universities, with Mandel speaking regularly at institutions including MIT, Wharton and Columbia on data transparency in commercial real estate. That visibility supports both sides of its marketplace: it recruits contributors and reassures enterprise buyers.

Data Verification and Trust

Trust is the central technical and commercial problem of a crowdsourced data business, because a database of contributed deal terms is only valuable if users believe the figures are real. CompStak addresses this by layering checks: contributions are sourced from identifiable industry professionals, screened by machine learning systems that flag anomalies, and reviewed by the company's own analysts before publication. The credit system reinforces the process by rewarding accuracy and uniqueness rather than volume alone, so that a member who submits careless or duplicated information gains little. This verification machinery is what separates the platform from a simple bulletin board and what allows institutional clients to rely on its data in underwriting.

Significance

CompStak's significance lies in what it demonstrated about transparency in commercial real estate. An industry accustomed to treating deal information as a private, relationship-based asset accepted a shared database once the exchange was designed so that giving data was the price of getting it. The result is a more efficient market for information itself, faster deal-making and valuations anchored in actual transactions. For the news media and researchers, CompStak's reports provide something previously hard to obtain: evidence about what tenants and buyers truly paid, rather than what landlords and sellers asked.