WILLISTON, ND—The American boom in oil and gas production hastransformed far more than the energy market. The boom has alsoswelled the population of towns such as Williston, ND and Hobbs,NM, among many others, and created the need for every imaginabletype of real estate. JLL responded to thistransformation by creating a special oil and gas practice aboutthree years ago that helps people in real estate understand therapid shifts occuring in the economy.

“The real estate industry was largely ignorant of what was goingon in energy,” Bruce Rutherford, the Houston-basedinternational director of JLL's oil and gas practice, tellsGlobeSt.com. As reported in GlobeSt.com last week, the firmrecently published its 2014 North AmericanEnergy Outlook study, which predicted that $80 billion inannual investments over the next six years will pour into the newenergy-producing regions, turning small outposts into genuine boomtowns.

The expansion, largely driven by fracking and other technologieswhich allow energy companies to extract oil and gas from shaleformations, “really did take most of the world by surprise,”Rutherford adds. “Pieces of the technology have been around for avery long time,” especially fracking, or fracturing the shalethrough hydraulic engineering, but only after recent advances ingeology and seismic technology were energy companies able toconsistently locate oil in the shale formations. “It's only in theUS that people were working on these things.”