Forecaster

Key Features

• Instantly view EA’s baseline forecasts for U.S. office, industrial, apartment and retail markets.
• Adjust a scenario and see the new forecast returned in seconds.
• Account for COVID-19 impacts on office demand, using EA's assumptions or your own.
• Quickly compare and export forecasts.
• Save and annotate scenarios.
• Batch upload scenarios from Excel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which real estate variables can I forecast?
Currently, Forecaster produces five-year forecasts of:

• Stock
• Completions
• Vacancy
• Net Absorption
• Real Rent Growth
• Nominal Rent Growth
• Real Rents
• Nominal Rents

Which markets can I forecast?
You can run metro-level forecasts for the U.S. office, industrial, apartment and retail markets in EA's coverage. Submarket forecasting will be added in a future release.

Can I adjust more than just demand?
We’ve enabled adjustable supply growth (completions) and inflation (CPI) in October 2020.

What about COVID-19?
We've enabled two COVID-19 demand adjustments for office markets. Consistent with new research from EA, you can create a demand impact profile for changing work-from-home rates, and another for in-office physical distancing. These are stored independently of your employment scenarios and can be applied separately, together, or not at all.

To simplify input, we let users set inflection points. We interpolate the quarterly values between those points and feed the result into the model. This way, if you think the WFH trend will rise or fall gradually over 10 years, you only have to place the ten-year point.

Eight available inflection points let you create a variety of shapes, but you need not use them all. Only values (user-provided and interpolated) within the five-year forecast period (the green shaded area on the chart) affect the forecast.

What should I know about saving scenarios?
Forecaster saves scenarios, not forecasts. To keep a forecast, you can either export it to Excel, or save the scenario to re-run later. Scenarios are initially valid during the quarter in which they were created. When a new quarter's data is released, scenarios go out of date. To continue using an out-of-date scenario, you can either load it and save it anew (with any changes), or you click a button to reassign its values to the current forecast period.

A scenario comprises 20 quarterly values for each of: employment growth, completions, and CPI. In Forecaster's initial release, only employment growth is adjustable. Completions and CPI are coming soon.

Does Forecaster work on mobile?
We don't currently support mobile devices. Using Forecaster on mobile is possible, but logging in can be difficult and certain parts of the interface might not work as expected, depending on your device and settings.