By Leandro Rovai

As multinational companies expand their real estate portfolios across continents, the challenge of obtaining reliable, actionable data becomes one of the most significant barriers to strategic decision-making. For a companies with operations in more than 200 countries and territories, the complexity is multiplied by the diversity of markets, regulatory environments and economic realities. Our biggest challenge today, as a global company, is not finding data — it’s having the same level of information available everywhere to guide our strategic decisions.

The Global Data Challenge
Managing a global real estate portfolio is not just about bricks and mortar — it’s about making informed decisions that align with business strategy, optimize costs and support growth. Yet one of the most persistent obstacles is the lack of consistent, high-quality information across markets.

In mature markets such as the United States, Western Europe and parts of Asia-Pacific, real estate data are relatively accessible. Market transparency, robust public records and a developed ecosystem of brokers and consultants provide a solid foundation for benchmarking, forecasting and strategic planning. In these regions, companies can access detailed reports on market rents, vacancy rates, construction pipelines and investment trends — often in real time.

However, as soon as we shift our focus to emerging markets — where much of the world’s economic growth is happening — the picture changes dramatically.

Emerging Markets: Growth and Information Gaps
Markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and several countries in Africa and the Middle East are experiencing rapid economic and demographic growth. These regions are critical for multinational companies seeking new consumers and supply chain efficiencies. Yet they are also the most challenging when it comes to obtaining reliable real estate data.

Why? The reasons are many:

• Fragmented Information Sources: Public records are often incomplete or outdated. Private databases may exist, but coverage is limited and data quality is inconsistent.
• Lack of Standardization: Definitions of “Class A office,” “industrial warehouse,” or even “vacancy rate” can vary widely from one country — or even one city — to another.
• Regulatory Complexity: Local regulations on property ownership, land use and reporting requirements can obscure the true picture of market dynamics.
• Limited Market Transparency: In some countries, real estate transactions are not publicly recorded, making it difficult to benchmark prices or track trends.

This is no longer just an internal observation from those of us running global portfolios — it’s now measured. JLL’s newly released Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2026, which scores 88 countries and 146 city markets across 260 individual indicators, confirms exactly this divide. And the more sobering finding isn’t just that the gap exists — it’s that it’s widening. The 13 markets classified as “Highly Transparent” saw transaction volumes grow 20 percentage points faster than the rest of the world over the past two years, and now account for 56% of global income-producing real estate and more than 80% of direct global investment. Capital, in other words, is voting with its feet toward the places where the data are trustworthy enough to act on.

JLL’s 13 Highly Transparent Real Estate Markets

Source: JLL

For a many big companies this means that strategic decisions — such as where to invest, consolidate or divest — are often made with incomplete information. The risk of misjudging a market’s potential or overpaying for assets is real.

The Importance of Local Intelligence
In these challenging environments, local knowledge becomes invaluable. Building relationships with trusted local partners, leveraging in-country teams and investing in on-the-ground research are essential strategies. Even then, the process is resource-intensive and time-consuming.

Our newest distribution center illustrates this same reality today. In September 2026, we inaugurated a new $59 million Mixing Distribution Center in Callao, Peru — now the largest distribution facility in the Andean region, spanning nearly 24,000 square meters (258,334 sq. ft.) with 29 loading docks and more than 18,560 storage positions, and lifting our finished-product capacity by roughly 43% and our raw-material capacity by about 42%. Construction alone generated over 1,000 direct and indirect local jobs.

Building the business case at that scale meant the same thing it always does in these markets: There was no single, standardized dataset to pull from for regional logistics capacity, local agricultural supply (the facility now sources Peruvian-grown potatoes, corn and sweet potatoes for several brands) or realistic construction costs. That picture had to be built market visit by market visit, in direct partnership with local government and community stakeholders — not assembled from a published report.

We faced a similar dynamic in Puebla, Mexico, where our Service Mixing Center now supports 29 distribution centers and 15 Product Exchange Centers across the country’s central and southeastern regions, with roughly 17,000 pallet positions. Formal market data helped confirm demand; it was local relationships and direct engagement that made the site work operationally.

The same holds true across other high-growth regions, where informal networks and personal relationships often provide more insight than published reports.

Mature vs. Emerging Markets: A World of Difference
The contrast between mature and emerging markets is stark. In the U.S. or Germany, a real estate manager can access a wealth of data with a few clicks. In Nigeria or Vietnam, the same manager may need to rely on anecdotal evidence, site visits and local contacts to build a business case.

This disparity affects everything from site selection and lease negotiations to risk management and sustainability planning. It also means that global portfolio strategies must be flexible, adaptable and grounded in a realistic understanding of local conditions.

It’s also worth noting that transparency is not a simple binary between “mature” and “emerging.” Even in some of the world’s most data-rich markets — the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia among them — Transparency International has pointed out persistent blind spots around beneficial ownership data: Knowing who ultimately owns a given property is often just as hard in Miami or London as it is in São Paulo or Jakarta. Having abundant market data on rents and vacancy doesn’t automatically mean full visibility into the assets and counterparties behind a transaction. It’s a useful reminder that “transparent” markets still have their own gaps — just different ones than the markets we usually flag as opaque.

The Foundation: Internal Data Integrity
While the search for reliable external market data is a constant challenge, it’s important to recognize that the value of any external information is only as strong as the accuracy of the internal data it’s compared against. For companies managing a vast and diverse portfolio, the ability to make strategic decisions depends first and foremost on having a clear, up-to-date and standardized view of our own assets, leases and operational metrics.

This is where most organizations actually lose the most ground — not in the emerging markets we like to blame, but in our own back office. Research from Forrester has found that between 60% and 73% of all data collected by companies is never used for analytical purposes at all.

Transparency is not a simple binary between “mature” and “emerging.” Even in some of the world’s most data-rich
markets — the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia among them — Transparency International has pointed out persistent blind spots around beneficial ownership data.

Sigma Computing’s research goes further: Sixty-three percent of companies fail to gain any real insight from the big data they collect, and 36% of employees say they don’t even know what can be done with the data their own organization has gathered.

Too often, organizations invest heavily in external market intelligence, only to discover that their internal records — property lists, lease abstracts, occupancy data or cost allocations — are incomplete, inconsistent or siloed across regions and business units. This disconnect can undermine even the best external benchmarking efforts. If you don’t know exactly what you own, lease or operate, how can you accurately assess market opportunities or risks?

That’s why we must prioritize robust internal data governance as the foundation of our real estate strategy. This means:

• Centralizing Portfolio Data: Creating a single source of truth for all real estate holdings, accessible to stakeholders across the globe.
• Standardizing Definitions: Ensuring that terms like “occupied space,” “vacancy” or “operational cost” mean the same thing in every market.
• Continuous Data Validation: Regularly auditing and updating records to reflect changes in the portfolio, market conditions and business needs.

Only when internal data are accurate and reliable can external market information be leveraged effectively. The combination of strong internal data management and targeted external intelligence is what enables truly strategic, data-driven decision-making — especially in a complex, fast-changing global environment.

Key Growth Markets — and Persistent Data Gaps
Today, the most important markets for multinational real estate investment are often those where information is hardest to obtain. India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, and several African economies are all projected to outpace global growth averages in the coming years. Yet these are precisely the markets where data gaps are most acute.

There are encouraging signs of movement, though. JLL’s 2026 index also shows that two-thirds of all tracked markets improved their transparency scores this year, and that India, Vietnam, South Korea, Australia and Thailand together account for half of the year’s 10 most-improved markets — driven largely by digitized land registries and growing adoption of AI-based analysis tools, now used by more than 90% of occupiers and investors surveyed.

Several Gulf markets, including Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, are moving in the same direction through government-led digitization. Even in China, where the real estate sector is massive, transparency issues and regulatory changes can still make it difficult to get a clear view of market fundamentals. The direction of travel is right; the pace, for now, remains uneven.

Conclusion: Navigating the Unknown
For global companies, the challenge is not just to find growth, but to do so with eyes wide open. This means investing in local intelligence, building robust internal knowledge networks and accepting that uncertainty is part of the equation.

Throughout my professional career I have learned that success in global real estate is not just about numbers — it’s about adaptability, resilience and a willingness to dig deeper for the insights that matter. As the world’s economies continue to shift and the transparency gap between leading and lagging markets continues to widen rather than close, the ability to make informed decisions in the face of imperfect information will remain a critical competitive advantage.

About the Author:
Leandro Rovai is Head of Portfolio Administration and Strategy for PGRE — PepsiCo Global Real Estate. Originally from Brazil, he holds an MBA in International Business from EAE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, and the Master of Corporate Real Estate (MCR) designation from CoreNet Global. He began his real estate career with construction companies and as a broker at JLL before joining PepsiCo in 2017 to manage the Latin America portfolio, a role he held until mid-2022, when he relocated to New York to lead the North America offices portfolio. He now leads portfolio administration and strategy for PepsiCo’s global real estate organization, and is a guest lecturer at SiiLA Academy, where he shares his knowledge with the next generation of real estate professionals in Latin America.

Read his May 2025 contribution to Site Selection, “How One Multinational Overcame Challenges of Real Estate Development in Latin America.”