In the past several months, consulting firm Casey Quirk & Associates has published several research reports on the asset management industry. Larry Gray, editorial director at Institutional Real Estate, Inc., spoke with Kevin Quirk, a founding partner of the firm, to discuss the reports’ findings and implications.

In your recent report “Crisis in Asset Management: Industry Profitability Under Siege,” what were some of the key conclusions regarding the challenges facing these firms?

We run an annual survey of the financials of asset management companies, and using that information that we’ve gathered historically, we built a model that projects forward estimates of the profitability over the next couple of years. Based on that, our big conclusion is that we expect operating profits to decline significantly over the next couple of years based on the substantial decline in asset values that we’ve seen.

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