No, I’m not talking about brokers. I’m talking about everything from Business Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Location Intelligence, etc.
Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one’s capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning,emotional knowledge, memory, planning, and problem solving.
I have a feeling we’re at peak Intelligence-as-a-buzzword territory. Take a look at the definition above and you can see why everyone wants to leverage this word to their advantage. If you are an expert at Financial Analysis why not turn it into Financial Intelligence to describe how you account for the qualitative aspects of a situation given your and your team’s experiences. Seems like a great selling point to me!
But that’s the problem with all buzzwords. They start out with good intentions and slowly they devolve into pure marketing sludge.
Of all the X Intelligence phrases in CRE, the only one that should be trusted right now is Business Intelligence and that one only because the definition and standards start from outside the industry. But even then you have to make sure that those saying they do Business Intelligence actually do it because it is still a misleading term a lot of the time.