AMB's David Twist

AMB Property Corp. recently released the first public edition of its Industrial Business Indicator (AMB IBI), a monthly diffusion index that integrates customer-supplied insights with macroeconomic data to provide leading indications of the strength and direction of its customers’ businesses, directional trend of the overall US economy and demand for distribution and industrial space. Though the October IBI, released in mid November, is the first issued for public release, the company has been producing the indicator internally since 2007. GlobeSt.com took the occasion of the public release to interview David C. Twist, AMB vice president for research, to find more about the index and learn what it provides that other more established indexes and prognosticators do not.

GlobeSt.com: Why did you wait two years to release the IBI to the public?

Twist: We thought about releasing it early on, but we wanted to make sure we felt comfortable it offered accurate and useful information. We wanted to be sure it was working and was a useful barometer of the market.