Helping a U.S. Pension Fund Make Smarter Strategic Investment Decisions

A top five U.S. pension fund was actively acquiring commercial real estate assets nationwide. The fund sought a more efficient, objective method to evaluate both individual properties and broader portfolio opportunities. The fund’s internal teams spent significant time collecting fragmented market data, which slowed decision-making, and introduced the risk of relying on incomplete or biased information. The fund turned to SitusAMC to identify better intelligence to help optimize its real estate investments and pursue opportunities through data-driven insights.  

SitusAMC introduced its Commercial Real Estate Selection Tool (CREST) to the fund. The Major Market CREST is a robust, yet intuitive analytical tool, that aggregates independent, rigorously researched market and submarket data across 50 U.S. markets. The tool enables faster, more confident decision-making across acquisition and disposition decisions, strategy, portfolio analysis and investment search preferences. (SitusAMC also has a Universal CREST tool covering 275 markets.) The collaboration spanned over a year to implement CREST as a solution. 

Additionally, SitusAMC provided tailored Tear Sheet Market Reports. These reports provide quick, but comprehensive, market information on main property types, and cover economic and demographic situations, investor sentiment and capital markets data, and property and submarket fundamentals and forecasts. 

Through the CREST tool and Tear Sheets, SitusAMC armed the fund with objective analysis, helping augment sponsor-provided data. SitusAMC enabled the fund to identify geographic risks and judge asset performance with greater clarity. SitusAMC’s responsiveness and consultative approach fostered trust and encouraged broader adoption of the CREST tool across the organization. The partnership reinforced the fund’s commitment to data-driven investing, and laid the foundation for expanded use of CREST across additional teams and portfolios.