Impartial Statistics: Delores Conway, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate Delores Conway has been spearheading Southern California-focused real estate research for the benefit of private sector developers, academic researchers and policy makers. "We are a strictly non-profit organization," she says. "Our goal is to get the data out there. My mantra is that the best data wins." In her fourth year as director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, Conway has been working to establish the center's reputation by producing detailed market data on markets and submarkets in Southern California. Conway has raised the USC Lusk Center's public profile, expanded its annual multifamily market report—which has doubled in size, and has worked to strengthen the center's two yearly public real estate conferences. A real estate economist known for her financial pricing models, Conway received her Ph.D. and master's degrees in statistics from Stanford University, and undergraduate degree in mathematics, statistics and computer methods from the University of Wisconsin. She is often interviewed by the national news media on residential and commercial real estate across the U.S., and is a frequent speaker on both apartment and condo issues. At the zenith of the condo fever in 2006, Conway broke the news of how well apartments were performing. Rents had increased 7 percent in Los Angeles County, 6.5 percent in Orange County and 9.4 percent in the Hollywood market by the end of fourth quarter 2005. "Everyone was watching single-family home and condo sales. No one was watching the rental market. We pointed to the tight supply for housing in Los Angeles. This was significant, Conway notes, as about half the population of Los Angeles rents. There are also public policy implications to Lusk Center's work. Conway recently gave an address to the Los Angeles City Council in which she explained that San Bernardino and Riverside counties were now becoming the affordable for-sale and for-rent alternatives to Los Angeles and Orange County. For example, rents average $1,000 there compared to $1,500 per month in L.A. and environs. Residents of the more-affordable counties then have to commute to West Los Angeles, where the jobs are. "What the industry realized is that we are all paying for [the lack of] affordable housing by way of the freeway. The cost is in another direction—on transportation," says Conway. The priority for now at Casden, says Conway, is to continue to build a strong base of "really good" clear, consistent and accurate fundamental data on the multihousing market. That will act as the basis for academic research that will proceed in future years examining the linkages between the housing market and capital markets or retail.
November 2, 2007