Market visibility is not a decision system.
CoStar is the dominant data layer for commercial real estate — comparables, ownership, leasing, sales transactions, market trends. Capital Refinery is the structured record of the investment decision in private capital. Different scope, different objects, complementary rather than competing.
What CoStar does well, and where the line is.
What CoStar is built for
Commercial real estate market intelligence at institutional scale.
Property fundamentals, ownership records, comparables, leasing intelligence, sales transactions, and market analytics across the U.S. and beyond. For CRE deal teams, brokers, and lenders, CoStar is the institutional standard for understanding the market — and there is no comparable substitute at its scale.
What it is not built for
Holding the investment decision as a structured testable record.
CoStar is a market-data layer. It surfaces what is happening in the market — it does not bind the assumptions a deal team relied on at IC to the operator data the asset is producing eighteen months later. The investment decision lives somewhere else, and CoStar has no schema for it.
Where Capital Refinery sits next to it
Underneath the IC stage, holding the position over time.
For CRE-focused private capital teams, CoStar is the upstream market layer that informs underwriting. Capital Refinery is the downstream decision layer that holds the IC record after the deal closes. The two answer different questions and most teams will keep both.
Where the lines fall.
| Capability | CoStar | Capital Refinery |
|---|---|---|
| CRE market intelligence and comparables | Strong — institutional standard | No — different scope |
| Ownership and leasing data | Strong | No |
| Domain model for the IC decision | No | Yes — first-class object |
| Structured investment record at IC | No | Yes — bound at approval |
| Operator data → entry assumption mapping | No | Yes — the data model |
| Decision validity scoring across the position | No | Yes |
The research behind this.
Your team will keep CoStar. The question is what governs the position after the underwrite.
Bring us a CRE deal from your portfolio. We will show you the structured decision layer the market-data stack is not designed to produce.