Dear Valued Clients,

After reviewing the submission requirements for this year’s Costar Power Broker rankings, we have decided to keep in place the company policy to “opt out” of the rankings. Although we have won the designation in the past, we have decided to withhold our submissions this year as we have for the past two years.

In order to qualify for investment sales or leasing rankings, we are required to submit all the deal specific information for transactions we are involved in, including lease rates and sale pricing. Texas is a non-disclosure state and client -agent confidentiality is of extreme importance.

Costar has verbally confirmed to us that the information provided to them, is later sold to the county appraisal district.

The appraisal district uses it to support increased property valuations which increases the tax liability for our owners and tenants. While we would appreciate the recognition among our peers for the record breaking year and hard work our team has done over this past year, we feel that this would be a violation of our fiduciary duty to our clients. Providing this information would benefit the firm, while harming our clients. This directly conflicts with our firm’s core values to place our clients first.

We strictly prohibit our team from sharing transaction specific information with online data providers in order to protect this sensitive data. ShouldCostar decide to revisit their policy of sharing the data with the appraisal district or allow us to submit for the rankings without providing deal specific data, we will revisit the firm’s position at that time.

Thank you for trusting us with your properties.

Sincerely,

Bethany Babcock, MBA
Chad Knibbe, CCIM