Modeling office returns at the regional level - Plausible and useful forecasts.

For years, NCREIF has been publishing real estate returns for four property types in eight fairly broadly defined regions of the country. NCREIF also summarizes returns by property type at the national level. These national e stimates are generally the data used in returns forecasting. Little use is made of the regional data, at least in terms of future outlook rather than past performance. In this article the authors discuss the return models the y created and their forecasts for the office markets in the eight NCREIF re gions. Their results show that these models can offer some interesting conc lusions about the differences among, and similarities across, real estate m arkets.