According to PPR's director of risk management and debt research, George Pappadopoulos, there is a "crying need" for data on commercial real estate defaults. "It's very difficult to get a good handle on performance data," he tells GlobeSt.com. "We're trying to get a little bit of a different viewpoint from the understanding of banks."

Pappadopoulos says the project will help benchmark risk models for future benefits and allow individual financial institutions to evaluate their own numbers more effectively. "The study will help banks to compare their portfolios against the overall industry's and examine how they compare as in individual bank to the group of banks as a whole."

RMA will begin recruiting participants immediately. Data collection and analysis will continue into the fall and PPR will present the study's initial findings to participants in December 2002.