The European Real Estate Society: ten years of constructive engagement

Citation

D’Arcy, É. and Tsolacos, S. (2005), "The European Real Estate Society: ten years of constructive engagement", Journal of Property Investment & Finance, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpif.2005.11223aaa.001

The European Real Estate Society: ten years of constructive engagement

In June 2003 the European Real Estate Society (ERES) celebrated its tenth anniversary by holding its annual conference in Helsinki, Finland. The conference was organised by Hanna Kaleva and Olli Olkkonen from KTI (The Finnish Institute of Real Estate Economics) with strong support from their KTI colleagues, the wider Finnish real estate community and the many sponsors of the conference. The Helsinki conference attracted over 350 participants from 31 countries with over 180 papers presented.

This special edition of the Journal of Property Investment & Finance contains the winner of the first annual Gerald Brown Memorial Prize, sponsored by Emerald, for the best paper presented on Real Estate Investment and Valuation at ERES 2003 and includes three other papers presented at the conference. The winner of the Gerald Brown Memorial Prize was “Investment performance within urban regeneration locations” by Alastair Adair, Jim Berry, Stanley McGreal, Joanna Poon, Norman Hutchison, Craig Watkins and Kenneth Gibb. In addition to this prize a number of other manuscript prizes were awarded to the authors of papers presented at the Helsinki Conference. The IPD prize for the best paper on Property Investment was awarded to Foort Hamelink and Martin Hoesli for their paper entitled “The maximum drawdown as a risk measure: the role of real estate in the optimal portfolio revisited”; the Grosvenor prize for the best paper in International Comparative Research was awarded to Kim Hiang Liow, Joseph Ooi and Li Lin for their paper entitled “‘The financial structure of real estate corporations: some international evidence”; the American Real Estate Society Foundation Prize was awarded to John Henneberry, Tony McGough and Fotis Mouzakis for their paper entitled “Planning regimes and their impacts on local business rents and local and national output”; and the special Rembrand Best Paper Award for Customer Orientation in the Real Estate Industry was awarded to Deborah Levy and Christina Lee for their paper entitled “Client switching behaviour in property services”.

ERES over the last ten years has come a long way since its first conference, held at the University of Amsterdam in 1994 and the pre-conference meeting hosted by the University of Reading in 1993. What was originally a society with a strong membership base in the UK and The Netherlands has now evolved into a truly Pan-European organisation. The ERES conference in recent years is testament to this with strong organic growth in participation from many European countries, in particular, Germany, Finland, France, Spain, Poland and Italy. This has been a very positive development.

The decade since the inception of ERES has also been a period of time in which the real estate world has undergone quite profound changes. In particular, the changes in the real estate business environment related to the revolution in communications and information technology, the movement of the real estate discipline from a largely technical base to one with a clear business orientation, and the increased internationalisation of real estate involvements at a number of levels. All these forces have created many new challenges for real estate. In particular, they have created new requirements for real estate research and education, with a strong desire for the dissemination of best practice internationally. In this respect ERES has played a key role by tacking the problem of extreme fragmentation in the European real estate knowledge base, by raising the quality, status and reach of real estate research and education in Europe and providing suitable platforms for constructive engagement through is annual conferences and other activities.

Since the Helsinki conference ERES has continued to expand its activities and attracted over 400 participants to its eleventh annual conference held in Milan, Italy in June 2004. The 2005 conference will take place in Dublin, Ireland from 15-18 June, with the 2006 conference taking place in Weimar, Germany and the 2007 conference in London, England. ERES has also successfully inaugurated its biannual industry research seminars which so far have taken place in Helsinki, Budapest, Milan and Frankfurt, on topics as diverse as REITS and logistics. Our web based activities are also reaching a new phase of development with the appointment in 2004 of new editors for our web and electronic newsletter. ERES also has launched the ERES Education Network which will organise the first ERES Education Network seminar in November 2005.

For more information on the European Real Estate Society, membership, conferences and initiatives please visit our web site at: www.eres.org

Éamonn D’Arcy Executive Director ERES, The University of Reading, Reading, UKSotiris TsolacosJones Lang LaSalle, London, UK