Academia Is Helping the Real Estate Industry Spot Macroeconomic Trends

In the late 1990’s a new type of person started to pop up in stock market trading floors. These traders did not have a background in finance, as was the norm, but instead had PhDs in fields like mathematics and statistics. They were also not very well received by the financial establishment, they were referred to by the slur “quant.” Eventually, the mathematicians started outperforming their peers and the term quant was embraced. Now traders promote their use of advanced computing by calling themselves quants.

Quant is short for quantitative analytics and it is a way to use statistical analysis on large amounts of data to identify trends and correlations. It has become the go to way for traders to understand what the probabilities are for different macroeconomic trends and asset price movements. But despite its prevalence in equity and options trading, it is still not widely used by many in the real estate industry.
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RSK: The University of Wisconsin Graaskamp Real Estate School is also doing cutting edge data analysis in CRE Tech as well.