Real Estate by Aladdin

1 in 5 deals end in regret.
CRE principals (buyers, sellers, investors, tenant users) rarely publicize bad deals, and there's no standardized reporting mechanism.

But here's what we can triangulate from:
■ Objective Proxy - Loan Default & Distress Rates - Historically, 5–15% of commercial mortgages enter some form of distress (default, workout, foreclosure) depending on the cycle. Post-GFC peaks hit ~8–9% CMBS delinquency. Post-COVID office distress pushed rates back toward 8–10%+ in certain asset classes. These represent deals that went objectively wrong — but regret likely runs higher than default rates alone.

■ Value-Add & Repositioning Failures - Industry practitioners commonly cite that 20–30% of value-add acquisitions fail to hit their projected returns, often due to underestimated capex, lease-up timing, or cap rate expansion. A subset of those would qualify as genuinely "bad deals."

■ Disposition at a Loss - NCREIF and other institutional data suggest that in any given cycle, 10–20% of properties are sold at a loss relative to acquisition cost, though this varies enormously by asset class and timing.
and

■ Subjective Regret (Survey-Based) - A handful of industry surveys (CCIM, NAIOP member polls) suggest that 25–40% of CRE principals report at least one transaction in their career where they felt they significantly overpaid, misjudged the market, or would have walked away in hindsight.

That's about 1 in 5 deals!
How do you choose a broker (expert)?
Thoughts?