From a small northwestern observatory…

For many years, Greenfield had been privileged to participate in the annual American Real Estate Society meetings, held in late April and typically in a warm, waterfront location.  This year’s meeting was at the Sanibel Harbor Marriott Resort, on the bay near Sanibel Island, Florida.

Of the major academic real estate organizations, ARES has the unique mission of bridging academia and practitioners, and as such draws a large contingent of Ph.D.-types (and others) from organizations like Greenfield.  Somewhat surprisingly for an organization which bridges academia and practice, ARES publishes the largest number of scholarly real estate publications, and has the top-ranked academic journal in the real estate, insurance, and banking fields (the Journal of Real Estate Research, edited by my good friend, Dr. Ko Wang of Johns Hopkins University).

Various researchers at Greenfield authored several papers accepted for presentation at the ARES meetings, including:

• The Impact of Fracking Sites on Brownfield Funding (Dr. Clifford Lipscomb)
• Can We Forecast the Next Bubble? (Kilpatrick and Lipscomb)
• A Primer on Cleaning Residential Real Estate Data (Lipscomb and Dr. Andy Krause of U. Melbourne)
• Using a Random Forest Process in an Automated Valuation Model (Lipscomb, Kilpatrick, Jessica Kenyon of Greenfield and Dan Tetrick of Greenfield)
• The Impact of the NAREIT Light Awards on REIT Performance (Kilpatrick and Lipscomb)

Additionally, I had the pleasure of serving as co-chair (with the esteemed Dr. Stephen Roulac of U. Ulster and Roulac Global Research) for one of the sessions where doctoral students presented their research.  Dr. Roulac and I heard presentations from students from Yale, from Royal Agricultural University and U. Aberdeen in the U.K, and U. Regensburg in Germany.

I’ll conclude with a big “shout-out” to Dr. Arthur Schwartz, who despite having been retired for quite a few years, serves as the volunteer Meeting Planner for ARES (at no small personal expense) and manages to secure world-class warm-water resorts for these spectacular meetings.  Sadly, he is taking a sabbatical for 2016, and the meeting will be in chilly Denver.  However, I’m pleased that the meeting will return to San Diego in April, 2017, and to Estero, Fl (near Ft. Myers) in 2018.