CHICAGO—NORC at the University of Chicago has decided to use its 75 years of experience in social science research to benefit the world of commercial real estate. NORC officials say that their new subscription-based service, called ForeGround, will provide forecasts and highly personalized strategic advice to researchers with REITs, public pension funds and other institutional investors that will help make sense of the huge volumes of data now available on many commercial sectors.

“We have a team of veteran researchers, each with many years of experience,” Jon Southard, chief economist of ForeGround and vice president of the new Commercial Real Estate Economics group at NORC, tells GlobeSt.com. “And they are accustomed to building relationships with other members of the research community.”

Through the hub ForeGroundresearch.org, subscribers will have access not only to forecasts and research on dozens of US metropolitan areas, but also one-on-one consultations which could touch on overall economic trends, new investment opportunities, or even how local market conditions will affect an individual development project. Therefore, rather than simply providing researchers with another stream of data, ForeGround will leverage the power of an online research community and “provide the opportunity to have conversations,” says Southard.

Southard previously was a founding employee at Torto Wheaton Research, where he developed market forecasts in the office, industrial, retail, multi-housing, and hotel sectors, as well as Commercial Mortgage Metrics, a product in partnership with Moody's Investor Services to analyze risk in commercial mortgage portfolios.

What he values about NORC is its long-standing commitment to scientific rigor and objectivity. “They have armies of statisticians,” he says, along with economists and data analysts, whose expertise that ForeGround will tap into. And as a unit of NORC, the ForeGround team has no financial ties to the commercial real estate sector beyond the services provided to its clients.

“There are so many sources of data,” Southard adds, that the chief task for the community of researchers is to “be able to interpret that data in a way that speaks to the leaders of their organizations.” And along with all of its other services, ForeGround will help researchers communicate with C-Suite executives by turning data into customized charts and graphs that “tell a story.”

Instant Insights /

New Forecasting Service Aims to Deepen CRE Research

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