CBRE's Ward Caswell

Boring. That’s how Ward S. Caswell describes the current recovery. And CB Richard Ellis’ director of information management sees no reason to believe that the upward trend will do anything else but continue on its boring, upward path. The following, exclusive interview is a milestone of sorts, timed as it is with the emergence of CBRE as GlobeSt.com’s newest MarketData provider, supplying the website with industrial and office statistics on a quarterly basis for all 21 US markets we cover. So why does Caswell yawn over the current state of the market? And what could rouse him from his ennui? Read on:

GlobeSt.com: What’s the biggest surprise for you in your latest statistics?

Caswell: The biggest surprise is the resiliency some of the markets are showing and their ability to bounce back quickly. For example, I’m glad to see Boston posting some fairly sizeable positive absorption, the magnitude of which surprises me. Boston tends to lag during recoveries, but it came in with a couple of million sf of positive absorption last quarter.