michaelskis
Sawdust Producer
- Messages
- 26,014
- Points
- 75
When you are a suburban community, you get lumped into the region for the big analysis for vacancy rates and often are part of a sub area. Here, the sub area has a general rationale, but is different than municipal boundaries... IE, our subarea also include a bit of the big city who has a lot of issues. So we always have a challenge getting real vacancy rate numbers. We do the normal things like review listings and cross reference that with units and square footage to come up with a number, but even those are not always complete as some places market their sites in one location vs another.
Recently an economic development web-based subscription service was touting all these amazing features and referenced real-time vacancy rates. When I asked what the level of confidence was in those numbers, they didn't even try to sell me on some predetermined script, but hemmed and hawed instead. Finally, they admitted they mine the sites like loopnet and a few others to get a number.
If you are a suburban community, absent doing our own unit by unit analysis, what have you discovered is the best way to get a good read on non-residential vacancy rates in our community?
Recently an economic development web-based subscription service was touting all these amazing features and referenced real-time vacancy rates. When I asked what the level of confidence was in those numbers, they didn't even try to sell me on some predetermined script, but hemmed and hawed instead. Finally, they admitted they mine the sites like loopnet and a few others to get a number.
If you are a suburban community, absent doing our own unit by unit analysis, what have you discovered is the best way to get a good read on non-residential vacancy rates in our community?
