Comp Shopping Is Broken at Most Communities. Here's How to Fix It.
Most comp shopping routines are built on habits, not strategy — same three properties, same weekly call, same surface-level data. Here's a sharper framework for submarket analysis that actually moves the needle on pricing decisions.
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The Problem With How Most Teams Shop Comps Ask the average leasing manager how they shop comps, and you'll hear something like: "We call our three main competitors every Monday and log it in a spreadsheet." That's not a comp strategy. That's a ritual. The data you collect from a weekly phone call tells you what a competitor wants you to think their rent is. It doesn't tell you what they're actually closing leases at, how aggressively they're conceding, how their availability has shifted since Tuesday, or what their renewal strategy looks like. You're building pricing decisions on incomplete information collected at a cadence that doesn't match how fast the market moves. Here's a better approach. Step 1: Define Your Submarket More Precisely Most operators define their competitive set by radius — pull everything within two miles and call it a submarket. The problem is that a twomile radius in a dense urban core might capture 40 properties with wildly different renter profiles, while in a suburban market it might capture three.