Meet JLL's 'Dean' Of Industrial Research

JLL strengthened its Chicago and Midwest industrial research team last October with the hiring of George Cutro as director of Midwest industrial research. George jumped to JLL after a 20-year career at Colliers earned him a reputation as the “dean” of industrial research directors.

After graduating from Lewis University in 1987 with a marketing degree, George found no marketing jobs were available, so he interned at a market research company doing cold calls. Eventually, he answered a blind ad for a market research position at Cushman & Wakefield, where they were looking for a similar skill set. George says everything was done by hand back then. Cushman had one computer shared by two people, pink cards, thermal fax paper rolls and the primary instrument at work was still the telephone. What George learned then still translates today, as he says he gets 80% of the information he seeks from face-to-face conversation.

George has been fast to embrace technology as a tool throughout his career. He remembers when he did comparative and year-to-year market analysis on Lotus Notes, then was able to incorporate spreadsheet analysis and Harvard Graphics to make research reports more entertaining. Once Excel and its graphics interface debuted, it became even easier to punch up stats. George is excited to integrate technology into the market reports at JLL. He and his team are working on a couple of exciting projects. One of them, a pipeline report, looks at projects in the ground and being delivered in order to create interactive spreadsheets with historical standards that brokers can use to present that information directly to clients.

Another project is a smartphone-enabled, 360-degree dashboard for smartphones and PDAs that allows brokers to interact with JLL data in real time. George envisions this transforming static market reports into dynamic data visualizations.

George has real estate in his blood. His father started a residential real estate career in 1976 as a way to augment his primary job as a truck driver. George’s grandfather owned a trucking company, Cutro Cartage, on the Northwest side of Chicago.

Away from the office, George relaxes at his Des Plaines home with his wife, Kathy, and three sons (Matthew, 22, Brian, 19, Stephen, 17), playing games on Facebook and reading. George says he wasn’t a reader in high school and decided to return to the classic literature he missed as a teen. He’s recently completed "The Great Gatsby," "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "1984".