By S
usan Piperato | National Real Estate Investor
According to the latest American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Consensus Construction Forecast, in December, the national building activity level for non-residential real estate is climbing. We spoke with AIA Chief Economist Kermit Baker to find out what’s behind the AIA’s prognosis. An edited transcript of that interview follows.
NREI: How does AIA monitor construction activity?
Kermit Baker: We run a Consensus Construction Forecast twice a year. We have seven or eight pros on the panel and we ask them to supply their topline forecast for non-residential building activity. We compile that and come up with the AIA Consensus, which is simply the average of all those numbers. We just did the most recent one at the end of the December, so the numbers are really pretty current. We break it down into commercial, institutional and industrial.
