March Madness has officially kicked off, and if you are like me, you had some methodology (or none) for filling out your bracket. Since I work in commercial real estate, I took a different approach. We looked at the 8 cities that will host games in the first round from a standpoint of commercial real estate transaction volume in 2013. Here are the markets in alpha order: 1. Buffalo, NY 2. Milwaukee, WI 3. Orlando, FL 4. Raleigh, NC 5. San Antonio, TX 6. San Diego, CA 7. Spokane, WA
8. St. Louis, MO Using numbers provided by Real Capital Analytics, we looked at what markets had the strongest sales volume in 2013 ($2.5m+) (office, industrial, retail).
*data was not available By the chart above, you can see that San Diego (which had strong sales in the 3 rd and 4 th Qtrs) had the greatest volume of sales in 2013. Looking at the brackets, there are four games playing in San Diego. VCU (5) vs SF Austin (12); UCLA (4) vs Tulsa (13); Arizona (1) vs Weber St (16); and Gonzaga (8) vs Oklahoma St (9). Statistics show that typically, not higher than a 6 seed wins the entire thing (The lowest seed to win the tournament is a #8 seed); so that leaves you with 3 choices. VCU, UCLA and Arizona. Since Arizona is a #1 seed, we have to go with them to win it all beatingUCLA in the final game. There you have it, commercial real estate sales will dictate the winner of this years March Madness. *Note: this is not the views of the entire Coldwell Banker Commercial organization. By: John Boyer, Director of Marketing, Coldwell Banker Commercial Affiliates. View more at Blog.CBCWorldwide.com