Noted Real Estate Economist Dr. Norm Miller Joins CoStar Group
Dr. Norm Miller will join CoStar Group as Vice President of Analytics. The appointment is effective January 1, 2010.
Dr. Miller has served for the past two-and-a-half years as professor and director of academic programs for the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego. In his new position with CoStar, Dr. Miller will work closely with the team of real estate economists at Property and Portfolio Research, Inc. (PPR) to integrate PPR's industry-leading investment analysis tools and market forecast services with CoStar's research database to achieve a common operating platform. CoStar's senior management will remain actively involved in the operation and management of PPR, which CoStar acquired earlier this year.
A similar integration effort is underway involving Resolve Technology, another recent CoStar acquisition. Through these acquisitions, CoStar intends to provide real estate investors with the ability to access and analyze market-level trends, and drill down into the property and transaction level details, thereby providing customers with greater transparency and insight into their real estate investment decisions.
CoStar also intends to further broaden its thought leadership in the real estate analytics area by working closely with top researchers and faculty involved in real estate research as well as by hiring additional staff with backgrounds in geo-spatial analysis, economic forecasting and strategic consulting.
In addition to his work as a professor and extensive and respected academic publication record, Dr. Miller has worked closely with CoStar for a number of years. With CoStar Group CEO Andrew Florance, Dr. Miller co-authored the first study confirming the income premium associated with green buildings that was recognized by the American Real Estate Society as the best paper published in the Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management in 2008. His most recent book, Commercial Real Estate Analysis and Investment, with Geltner, Eicholtz and Clayton, is in its second edition and is considered the leading graduate-level textbook in the world. Dr. Miller is a past president of The American Real Estate Society (ARES), and he also serves as the editor of the Journal of Sustainable Real Estate, a new academic journal published by ARES with support from CoStar Group.
"We believe the combination of PPR's strong analytic and market forecasting capabilities with the industry's most comprehensive and widely-used database of commercial real estate information will greatly benefit both PPR and CoStar's customers, and we are committed to achieving this integration as quickly as possible," said CoStar Group CEO Andrew Florance. "Norm's impeccable academic background as an economist, his extensive work in applied real estate econometrics, and his experience working with CoStar's research and product development groups make him an outstanding choice for directing this important collaborative effort to bring about this integration and make PPR's investment analysis and forecasting advantages available to CoStar's broad client base," Florance added.
"I welcome this opportunity to join CoStar and I look forward to working with Dr. (Ruijue) Peng and her colleagues at PPR to support their work in providing advanced real estate analytic solutions by incorporating CoStar's unmatched data resources," said Dr. Miller. "Working together, I am confident we will realize the full potential of this combination to extend PPR's leading position as a strategic consultant for real estate investors and lenders, and expand CoStar's business intelligence and analytics platform."
Dr. Miller will remain affiliated as a professor with the University of San Diego and as an Emeritus Professor from the University of Cincinnati. He is also a faculty member at the Homer Hoyt Institute Maury Seldin School of Advanced Studies and a Distinguished Fellow with NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.