No analyst firms cover real estate. Bloggers do.
It's one of the businesses of Wall Street to research and make portfolio recommendations. There is a cottage industry of analyst firms that survey industries like technology, media and finance, and aspire to consult with both the sell-side brokers and the buy-side portfolio managers at corporations and investment/pension funds.
Before the internet, the research analysts at the investment banks and the analyst firms held proprietary research and data that they could leverage either for more transactional revenue - trading and consultative services like investment banking or M&A - or, in the case of the analyst firms like Gartner or Forrester, subscription revenue. The internet as data equalizer seems to threaten the analyst firms' livelihood by making it more difficult to provide data of proprietary value. (The same parallels can be made about the analyst industry to journalism, another research intensive industry)
Now all the analysts are writing blogs, and Forrester itself hired blogger Jeremiah Owyang to survey web strategies. Jeremiah provides a great resource list and index of analyst blogs. One site Tekrati indexes all the analyst blogs and provides aggregated Google custom search across these blogs. A search for "real estate" turned up very little information of value on the real estate industry; the only analyst firm that shows up is the Kelsey Group, which specializes in online local media and social networks, which touches slightly on real estate.
The conclusion - analyst firms do not follow the real estate industry. I've always been partial to analyst research for credibility and attention to arcane details (after all, it is their job), and it strikes me as unusual that such an opaque industry hasn't had an analyst infrastructure to explain how the industry operates. Now, we have a full blown real estate blogosphere (plus the Inman "researchers" ) doing this.
For example, coming from a Wall Street background, my first inclination when I began writing articles about internet lead generation or title insurance was to ask my investment banking friends for their company's research reports on the topics. Well, try to find any report, proprietary or publicly online, that analyzes the title insurance industry beyond its superficial facts. I don't think it exists - and that means the title industry will continue to remain somewhat opaque. Without third party analysis, I realized the best (and only) method was to research these topics over the internet, talk with management teams, and find the anecdotes to cobble together insightful pieces.
And that's why I consider Transparent Real Estate an "analyst's blog" that resides within a community of other analytical blogs that Todd Carpenter suitably listed yesterday (I would also add FBS, Steven Groves, Realonomics, 1000Watt, and ForSalebyLocals as carrying distinctive and detailed voices). I should mention bloggers aren't generally trained as analysts, so their aggregate output, checked and balanced by Web 2.0 commentary, will approximate what is going on in the industry. And that's good enough... it adds tremendous value, particularly when you think about the relative sparsity of online content on real estate pre-Web 2.0.
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