Aareal Award of Excellence - Blog

Hi everyone,

I wish all of you and your families a merry Christmas with peaceful holidays and a lovely New Year’s Eve!

I’m very pleased about all comments, reports and details about the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate Research on facebook, Xing and our Aareal Award blog! We are all looking forward to the New Year with many more posts and interviews. We’re going to have an interesting interview with Maximilian Brauers, the first prize winner of the Aareal Award 2009, in January. Feel free to join the blog and ask Maximilian questions and details about his time after his winning the award.

We are going to have a little Christmas break now and will be right back on January 4^th, 2010!

Have a wonderful time and see you in January!

Kirsten

Our EBS Real Estate Management Institute at the European Business School (EBS) was founded by our kind Professor Nico B. Rottke in 2006. As of today, we have nine professors or heads of chairs who are active in real estate research and teaching. Professor Rottke’s chair, the Aareal Endowed Chair of Real Estate Investment and Finance, consists of 3 administrative employees and 10 academic research assistants who all support the chair’s research like book publications (“Real Estate Capital Markets”, “Real Estate Private Equity” and “Economy versus Ecology”), the yearly real estate congress, teachings in the field of real estate, help with the supervising of the students’ theses and put great effort in providing the real estate community with attractive programmes like the Aareal Award. When the European Business School grew bigger, our institute and some others moved to Wiesbaden Schierstein into a very exclusive office building in order to have enough room for all academic researchers and staff.

What is very important to us is corporate social responsibility - our students at all educational levels must take the interests of society into account by assuming responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment.

Each month we distribute our institute’s newsletter to all people interested in real estate teachings and research to give information on new educational programmes, on events and new book releases.

We’re always looking forward to important research projects at our competence centres and bringing together experts from the real estate industry with scientific researchers in order to create a huge real estate community to improve the scientific foundation in the German real estate industry.

Praxis meets Theory!

The initiators of the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate Science come up with three new topics every year in order to cover as many research topics as possible. Researchers in the real estate industry can address their theses to one of the three topics, which have been defined by the researchers of the EBS-REMI for the Aareal Award 2010:

Real Estate Financing Products and Ratings

While in the years before the current financial and economic crisis modern/alternative financing products (like securitization via MBS or CDOs) have become the centre of interest, in times of crisis the traditional financing products have proven to often be the only remaining financing possibility (not least due to the dry out of the securitization market). Despite the need for an intense examination of the traditional as well as the modern/alternative financing methods, real estate science has now the task to deal with the increased requirements of a sound rating system, as well as with a structuring of real estate specific financing products.

Real Estate Investment Products

Besides traditional direct real estate investments, indirect real estate investments become more and more important, which is due to an increasing integration of real estate markets and capital markets. In comparison to direct investments, indirect investments allow primarily higher fungibility and transparency, along with an increasing complexity and risk structure. As a consequence real estate science has to focus more on the connection between real estate markets and capital markets.

Real Estate and Demographics

The world is facing with an incommensurable demographic change. While the industrialized countries are confronted with a constantly diminishing and aging population, emerging economies encounter an explosive growth of their populations. Despite these two effects, an increasing urbanisation can be identified – in 2008 for the first time more than 50% of the world’s population lived in agglomerations. This development makes the real estate industry having to face special challenges, but at the same times offers numerous opportunities.

Dear guests, thank you for being here today and for your interest in real estate research!

I commenced my General Business studies at the European Business School in 1996, and graduated in 1999 with a Master in Real Estate. Real estate research is a broad field, which is flanked by real estate law, real estate tax law and real estate economics. It is exactly this diversity that has always fascinated me. In 2008, the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate was jointly created by my Chair of Real Estate Investment and Finance at the European Business School (EBS) and by Aareal Bank AG with the intention to offer those interested in real estate research an incentive to promote real estate economics, to be innovative and to create new trends.

With the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate Research, I hope that many will share my affinity for real estate research and at the same time have the courage to turn in their research papers to have them reviewed by international experts.

I am looking forward to your research material and keep my fingers crossed for a first prize.

Yours sincerely,
Nico Rottke

I have been working for the EBS Real Estate Management Institute since March 2009. I manage all press and communication related tasks and inform all people on news and events taking place at our instiute. What makes my job so interesting is the fascinating range of tasks and the team bubbling over with ideas to increase the interest of students and professionals on real estate related research.

With this blog I want to inform all people about the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate Research and give some background information on topics and people involved. I will introduce to you some winners of the last years’ awards and tell you some details on real estate industry events and news.

I’m looking forward to an active blog with intersting conversations and questions referring academic reaserch papers and real estate topics and events.

I wish all of you good luck in bringing home the Aareal Award of Excellence in Real Estate Research 2010!

Kirsten