April 23: C&W’s Sicola to Deliver Keynote at IBA Real Estate Investments Conference

ATLANTA - April 14, 2015 - PRLog -- Cushman & Wakefield’s Maria T. Sicola, head of Research for the Americas, will serve as a keynote speaker for the International Bar Association’s upcoming 7th Annual Real Estate Investments Conference. Slated for April 22-24 at the Twelve Hotel & Residences Atlantic Station in Atlanta, the event caters to private-practice lawyers, in-house counsels, bankers active in the real estate industry, fund managers, senior managers in real estate companies, accountants, brokers and other industry service providers.

Sicola will deliver an economic outlook for real estate during the conference luncheon on Thursday, April 23. Her presentation will feature a detailed discussion of the status of trends, opportunities, and challenges facing the real estate world in 2015 and beyond, and will also contrast the status of the U.S. economic recovery with the status of recovery in the Euro Zone.

“U.S. businesses are more optimistic than they have been since 2007, anticipating strong sales growth,” Sicola said. “As their focus shifts from concerns about costs to growing top line revenue, they are hiring more aggressively. The environment over the next three years will be the best for the commercial real estate sector in more than a decade. In fact, we anticipate that the combination of rising employment and incomes, strong consumer spending and business investment growth will likely lead to strong demand across all property types.”

A Cushman & Wakefield executive managing director based in San Francisco, Sicola is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and a regularly quoted media source. She leads the commercial real estate services firm’s market research efforts in North America. Her team performs rigorous, property-oriented studies and data-driven analysis, collecting data from an array of publicly available sources, owners, agents and most importantly, from the firm's brokers, appraisers and property managers.

Cushman & Wakefield is recognized worldwide for the originality of its research and the value of its thought leadership. The firm’s 228 research professionals track more than 26 billion square feet in 170 office and industrial markets worldwide. Senior research personnel use proprietary as well as secondary data to produce reports on topics affecting the real estate industry.