Developing Confidence Intervals for Office Market Forecasts

This study focuses on the precision of models that forecast office construction and absorption. The article is novel because for the first time it applies Feldsteins (1971) technique for developing forecast standard errors in the presence of stochastic exogenous variables. The purpose of the article is not to find behavioral relationships but rather to evaluate forecasts. We find that in the case of many office markets, standard errors of long-term forecasts for absorption and completions are quite large, and therefore the forecasts themselves should not be used as a reliable basis for underwriting.