C&W Launches Quantitative Insights Group to Leverage AI Tech

Cushman & Wakefield is using artificial intelligence to bring its business into the future. 

The global real estate firm announced Tuesday that it is launching its internal Quantitative Insights Group, a team of trained economists and technology professionals who will operate a platform powered by advanced mathematics and AI tools to advise brokers, clients and  institutional investors alike on their commercial real estate decisions. 

The firm appointed Rebecca Rockey, deputy chief economist and global head of forecasting at Cushman & Wakefield, as the new head of Quantitative Insights and the group’s principal economist. Rocky’s team will consist of roughly 20 professionals, including David Hoebbel, head of commercial analytics, and Greg Nelson, senior data and analytics manager. 

Rockey told CO that she approached Cushman leadership in February as she thought back on her more than 10 years with the firm and wondered how it could evolve to take advantage of the new data landscape featuring AI, advanced mathematical quantitative networks, and cloud computing. 

“I had the privilege to work on this research last year that really opened up a Pandora’s box of untapped opportunity, and I was trying to think through, ‘How do I put all of this together?’” she recalled. “I’m very fortunate that we have leaders that listened to me because I approached them and said, ‘I think I have a good idea. It might sound crazy,’  and their reaction was, ‘We like the craziest version of this idea, and we see where you’re going with this.’” 

The Quantitative Insights Group at Cushman & Wakefield will feature new internal online platforms that will forecast and collate all forward-looking analytics data produced internally, while integrating it into new methodologies that leverage big data, deep machine learning, quantitative computing and AI.

By combining data science with geospatial analytics functions, Rockey’s group aims to find, if not create, new synergies across CRE markets, investments and asset classes that might not be apparent to brokers, investors or clients using current computer models. 

“As an industry, everything is data-fying, everywhere. And it’s not just in commercial real estate. It’s the datafication of the world right now,” said Rockey. “The analytics space is expanding, and we need to be laser-focused on being at the frontier of that every single day as it’s growing and evolving.”

“This is not only about scaling capabilities and using new techniques just for the sake of forecasting, this is also saying we want to innovate new methodologies, new ways of looking at the world,” she continued. “Because, in our experience of doing this, we’ve found that there are things that we can learn that nobody knew, and we can create better advice around it.” 

Using an example, Rockey spoke to the crosscurrents that the Quantitative Insights Group has already found among the national office markets, the multifamily markets, and the single-family housing market amid non-real estate forces emerging out of changing demographics, economic mobility statistics, and socioeconomic factors in different American cities.  

“[We realized] they have things in common that allow me to make more effective predictions, and those can be based on different economic outcomes, those can be based on zoning changes and how we think the composition of real estate here is going to change,” she explained, noting this new information can influence investor outcomes, pricing and valuations.  

Rockey emphasized that the Quantitative Insights Group would not be possible without AI technology and deep machine learning, which has increased the firm’s capabilities with handling large amounts of numerical analysis and the processing across large language models, all which will now be used to pull the vast amount of data Cushman & Wakefield possesses into a coherent program accessible to brokers and clients alike. 

“There hasn’t been this connective tissue to kind of say, ‘OK, let’s put all of that data together and all of this other data, which is coming out of our proprietary systems, information that we have that nobody else does, and all of this deep analytical work that we’ve done to say, this is actually the decision that we think is going to result in this outcome,’” explained Rockey. 

Most importantly, Rockey said the intent of the new initiative is to have data-driven products that are integrated to all the services provided by the brokerage to make different points of CRE decision-making more data enhanced and more strategic. 

“And that could be an interactive tool that clients can access to, and it can also be something that also enhances the delivery of our fee-earners capabilities, in a partnership,” she said. “Think about it as very data-forward.”

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.