From a small northwestern observatory…

ARES is one of the two primary real estate academic organizations in the U.S.  (The other is the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, “AREUEA”).  While most real estate academics are members of both, ARES also attracts a significant number of practitioners (typically ex-professors who are now in the consulting or investments business) plus has a great relationship with such practitioner organizations as the Appraisal Institute and the Royal institution of Chartered Surveyors.  ARES publishes several of the top real estate academic journals, including the Journal of Real Estate Research (for which I’m a reviewer), the Journal of Real Estate Literature, the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education, the Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management, the Journal of Housing Research, and the Journal of Sustainable Real Estate (for which I’m on the editorial board).

ARES holds its annual meeting in April, usually in a coastal city on alternating sides of the US.  This year’s meeting was last week at St. Pete Beach, Florida (an island just off the St. Petersburg coast), and we believe we set a record for attendance at a real estate academic conference.  Several hundred working papers and panel presentations dominated the program, along with sessions featuring research from doctoral students, and a well-attended, day-long “Critical Issues Seminar” on Wednesday co-sponsored by the Appraisal Institute and the CCIM Institute.

I presented papers in sessions, including one I chaired (“Real Estate Cycles”) and participated in an excellent panel discussion on Friday on “Real Estate Failure”, chaired by my good friend Dr. Gordon Brown of Space Analytics (and featuring Dr. Larry Wofford of U. Tulsa, Dr. Richard Peiser of Harvard, and myself).

I’m still digesting the huge volume of intellectual content that came out of ARES, and I’ll probably discuss some of these papers in future blog posts.  More later!