Commercial Property Guide’s hard work analysing commercial real estate price movements has been rewarded with the granting of a patent (number 2018101348) by IP Australia for its Commercial Property Asking Price Index.

The Asking Price Index for Commercial Real Estate is a new automatic process that re-uses online advertising data to generate data tracking movements in commercial property sale and lease prices. The process relies on the characteristic of Commercial Real Estate that it is basically a commodity market with a very large number of sellers and buyers. This is true for both the purchase and the lease of commercial property, unlike residential property which has many more variables than primarily size determining its price. The innovation provides a unique low cost and reliable method of automating a previously manual process which in addition removes any bias based on commercial incentives from those who provide the information used to measure price movements.

Today is the worst time to be predicting the future, however it's the best time to watch the behaviour of commercial property experts and that is precisely what the Asking Price Index focuses on.

The patent applies to the process of automatically calculating changes in asking prices for commercial real estate in Australia. The Index records 30 data points for both sale and lease prices across the 5 mainland capital cities for each of the office, industrial and retail property types.

The index requires no manual processing and can be calculated in near realtime.

CEO of Commercial Property Guide, Simon Rose says, “This patent is an important recognition of a technology advancement that give Commercial Property Guide a competitive edge over the media giants.”

Simon explains, “This patented method will be the foundation for our exploration of artificial intelligence and other machine learning techniques for commercial real estate. The power of this patented innovation comes when our commercial property insights are combined with other data sources such as government information.”

An example of this can be already seen in the correlation between our Asking Price Index and monthly business confidence surveys.

This is our stepping stone to new insights. Commercial Property Guide plans a series of Artificial Intelligence initiatives that will identify commercial property market anomalies such as pricing mismatches in particular areas, property types both over time and by comparison to similar locations.

The government’s Research and Development tax offset has provided a springboard to help fund these innovations more quickly. The Asking Price Index is a fresh perspective on one of many tired and worn-out commercial real estate processes that need re-visiting.