A message from Income Analytics Co-Founder & CEO, Matthew Richardson
Today is a special occasion as it is 5 years since Income Analytics launched the first full version of our current INCANS platform.
Development of the platform was driven by our desire to help the global commercial real estate investment markets become more efficient and transparent but, more importantly, we wanted to help the industry compete more effectively for capital vs equity and debt markets.
Given that c70+% of long term investment performance comes from the income component, it struck us as rather odd that the real estate industry spends so little time trying to quantify and price the risk attached to the underlying cashflows (viz GFC in 2007). After all, you wouldn't buy a bond without checking the probability that the borrower might default so why is it acceptable in real estate that investors and lenders do little more than sneak a peak at a company credit report for their due diligence or ongoing income risk management?
Take a look at the investor fact sheets and presentations provided by most REITS and real estate funds and I challenge you to find a single mention or measure of actual income quality beyond the names of a few key tenants. Yet they are asking you to buy a product that is predominantly a function of its cashflow. It just wouldn't happen in other investment asset classes.
With INCANS we gave the industry the ability to finally measure the % probability of potential income loss at lease, asset and fund level. This in turn has allowed the real estate industry to (i) better explain how returns are derived and (ii) compete for capital more effectively with equity and debt markets.
So I wanted to to say a big thank you to all our clients and particularly those of you who took the plunge early on and were prepared to back us through those difficult early years.
The numbers are impressive. We now rate £9.2bn of rental cashflows EVERY DAY across 59,000 leases and 9,500 assets on behalf our our clients. Added to that we provide users with due dilgence tools, fund reporting, risk benchmarking, research and sophisticated analytics to calculate expected loss and required cap rate adjustments.
We have also branched out in terms of our client base with subscribers in 14 countries worldwide including, Canada, US, France, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Spain.
All in all we've come a long way but I reserve my biggest thanks to our employees. Without them none of this would have been possible and I have nothing but the greatest respect for their hard work, dedication and initiative. It's a priviliege to work with them.
If you are already client we very much appreciate your business and if you aren't, please get in touch to see how we can help make your real estate investment or lending processes more efficient and transparent.
