ProTips for new Commercial Real Estate Analysts - Analyze it like the Pros

This is an answer to a question from a new commercial real estate analyst that covers the basics for analyzing a market. Here is the question that was posed:

New analyst on the IS side at a brokerage in the Midwest. Focus on multifamily & student housing.
Boss wants me to do an analysis (nothing PhD level or anything, I'm a fresh grad from bachelor's) on our market. Something we can show to clients to sell our market narrative to them better.
I studied economics and not real estate or finance in college, so I'm not super familiar with all the different real-estate specific ratios and metrics one would look at to determine how good a market is to invest in. Basic macroeconomic stats and trends I can use common sense to evaluate, but a question like "How over/undersupplied is market x? How will that drive property values going forward?" is somewhat puzzling to me. I know I can look at the absorption rate, for example, and that will tell me something about supply/demand dynamics, but that's not a complete picture to me, just one data point. I'm struggling to come up with a larger, more comprehensive conceptual framework that gives me context on the data I come across.
So far, I've broken down my state into its hierarchy of CSAs and MSAs, and have been collating some basic demographic and economic data on the different regions, but don't know what real estate-specific data points to drill down on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CommercialRealEstate/comments/13grb1f/advice_on_doing_an_analysiswriteup_on_my_market/

DealIQ 2