What CoStar can't tell you about a hotel's demand

Subscription datasets are table stakes: everyone in the room has the same STR report and the same comps. The demand model that anchored a recent hotel offering memorandum came instead from combining mobility data, event calendars, and permit pipelines — sources nobody else in the bidding tent was looking at.

The general rule

Subscription data describes the asset. Alternative data describes the demand for the asset. Pitches are won on the second kind.

What went into the model

Foot-traffic panels calibrated against actual occupancy, a scraped events corpus with attendance estimates, and the supply pipeline from DOB permits — weighted into a demand index the OM could defend line by line.